Safety fears over Japan spent nuclear fuel plant
Date: 25-Nov-02
Country: JAPAN
The plant at Rokkasho on the windswept northern tip of Japan's main island, Honshu, would be Japan's first commercial plant for reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. Its opening has already been delayed twice.
Environmental campaign group Greenpeace said the plant would release into the atmosphere massive amounts of radioactive Krypton-85 gas, which has the potential to cause cancer.
"For the sake of the environment, human health and non-proliferation, this facility has to be scrapped before one gram of nuclear material is introduced," Kazue Suzuki, nuclear campaigner for Greenpeace Japan, said in a statement.
Japan's nuclear industry is under harsh scrutiny following a scandal at Tokyo Electric Power Co Inc (TEPCO) , the country's biggest power utility, which admitted it had falsified nuclear safety records.
The Rokkasho plant is a key link in resource-poor Japan's ambitions to create a domestic nuclear fuel chain in which uranium recycled from spent fuel would be used repeatedly at nuclear power plants, the source of roughly a third of the domestic power supply.
When completed, the plant will be capable of reprocessing 800 tonnes of the roughly 900 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel that pour out of Japan's nuclear power plants every year.
Greenpeace said that that the United States and Germany had both changed plans to build similar plants because of the potential emission of radioactive Krypton-85.
"High levels of krypton will be detected not only around the plant, but also throughout Japan, in many cases hundreds and thousands of times stronger than regular background levels," Shaun Burnie of Greenpeace International told Reuters.
"It makes no economic sense, no environmental sense, and no health sense."
An official at the division in Japan's Trade Ministry concerned with nuclear safety said that the government had investigated and was sure that all precautions would be taken.
"We cannot say that the amount of radioactive gas to be released will be exactly zero, but it will not be in any amounts that are detrimental to health," the official said.
Intermittent problems in Japan's nuclear industry have fanned safety concerns, most recently in September, when TEPCO said it had failed to accurately report cracks in the structure of nuclear reactors found during safety checks in the late 1980s and 1990s.
Japan's worst nuclear accident took place at a uranium processing plant in Tokaimura, 140 km (90 miles) northeast of Tokyo, in September 1999, exposing hundreds of nearby residents, plant workers and emergency personnel to radiation.
Two of the plant workers later died.
