The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 6 | Issue 8 | Article ID 2849 | Aug 01, 2008 1 August Nuclear Thoughts: the New Proliferation (Available in Korean) Gavan McCormack August Nuclear Thoughts: the New Proliferation Gavan McCormack Available in Korean (http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_ view.html?artid=200808041812285&code= 990000) It is 63 years since mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclear age. The attacks on the two cities are now solemnly commemorated on 6 and 9 August, when the two city mayors issue their messages calling on the world to disarm, messages as necessary as they are certain to be ignored by the powers. “Fire’, Panel 2 of the Hiroshima Panels, by Iri and Toshi Maruki (Collection of the Hiroshima Panels Foundation Maruki Gallery) The five nuclear club members, led by the single super-power, refuse to carry out their obligation under the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty (actually an abolition treaty) to demolish their arsenals. At the most recent, five year, review meeting of the organization in 2005, they insisted that the function of the treaty be confined to blocking outsiders, other than those such as Israel, India and Pakistan to whom de facto honorary membership has been extended, from admission. The NNPT (Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty) becomes the NPPT (Nuclear Privilege Protection Treaty). Super-powers and regional powers alike, unable to envisage their security without nuclear weapons, will therefore politely acknowledge but ignore the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Declarations. In the teeth of powerful citizen opposition, the British Labour government has already decided to maintain (renew) its Trident nuclear submarine-based “deterrent” into at least the mid 21st century.
Transcript
The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 6 | Issue 8 | Article ID 2849 | Aug 01, 2008
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August Nuclear Thoughts: the New Proliferation (Available inKorean)
Gavan McCormack
August Nuclear Thoughts: the NewProliferation
Gavan McCormack
A v a i l a b l e i n K o r e a n(http://news.khan.co.kr/kh_news/khan_art_view.html?artid=200808041812285&code=990000)
It is 63 years since mushroom clouds overHiroshima and Nagasaki ushered in the nuclearage. The attacks on the two cities are nowsolemnly commemorated on 6 and 9 August,when the two city mayors issue their messagescalling on the world to disarm, messages asnecessary as they are certain to be ignored bythe powers.
“Fire’, Panel 2 of the Hiroshima Panels, by
Iri and Toshi Maruki (Collection of theHiroshima Panels Foundation MarukiGallery)
The five nuclear club members, led by thesingle super-power, refuse to carry out theirobligation under the 1968 Non-ProliferationTreaty (actually an abolition treaty) to demolishtheir arsenals. At the most recent, five year,review meeting of the organization in 2005,they insisted that the function of the treaty beconfined to blocking outsiders, other than thosesuch as Israel, India and Pakistan to whom defacto honorary membership has been extended,from admission. The NNPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) becomes the NPPT(Nuclear Privilege Protection Treaty).
Super-powers and regional powers alike,unable to envisage their security withoutnuclear weapons, will therefore politelyacknowledge but ignore the Hiroshima andNagasaki Declarations. In the teeth of powerfulcitizen opposition, the British Labourgovernment has already decided to maintain(renew) its Trident nuclear submarine-based“deterrent” into at least the mid 21st century.
Other middle-level states (including Japan andAustralia) likewise put their faith in nuclearweapons, believing that their security would becompromised were it not for the protection ofan ally’s nuclear “umbrella.” States frozen outof the system and facing hostile relations withone or other “major” power follow the samelogic and make every effort to join the club.Faith in nuclear weapons has thus become nearuniversal. Global society seems to have becomeinured, even de-sensitized, to nuclear weapons.Global security in the 21st century continues torest on the very substance that most threatensit.
But there is a new dimension to the nuclearthreat, one that the Hiroshima and Nagasakideclarations will likely pass over lightly, if theymention it at all. The world leaders whoyesterday gave us plutonium-based securitytoday point to the threat of global warming andclimate catastrophe and offer a formula forsurvival: one based on plutonium. A nuclear“renaissance” lies ahead since, according toPresident George W. Bush, nuclear energy is“clean” and “renewable” and nuclear plants“are the best solution to making sure we haveeconomic growth and at the same time [are]good stewards of the environment.” Nuclear
energy, the byproduct of the search for theultimate weapon of mass destruction, will bethe salvation of humankind.
Levels of nuclear dependence in electricitysupply vary greatly across the world, with aglobal average around 16 per cent. In the UK,US, Japan, South Korea, and France, it is 18,19, 35, 40, and 78 per cent respectively.Although the industry has been in the doldrumsfor decades, following the near catastrophes ofThree Mile Island in 1979 and Chernobyl in1986, the Bush administration now insists thattechnology has advanced to the point of beingable to guarantee virtual safety.
In February 2006, Washington announced aGlobal Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), akind of nuclear energy “coalition of the willing”to control the production, processing, storage,sale, and disposal of nuclear materials and tooffer facilities to the rest of the world on alease basis, side-stepping the existing UN-centred international control framework. At USurging, 20 countries have thus far signed aGNEP Statement of Principles that “embracesthe development and use of reprocessingtechnology and contains no commitment on thepart of its members to limit the spread ofsensitive nuclear fuel cycle technology such asreprocessing plants.” [1] The call for world-wide expansion of the nuclear industry reversesthree decades of anti-proliferation policy on thepart of the global superpower.
“Renaissance” talk spreads excitement in thenuc lear industry and on the par t o fgovernments around the world. Contracts forthe construction of four new reactors wereawarded in the US earlier this year; Japan hastwo reactors under construction, four at thefinal stages of regulatory review, and anadditional seven that “may be built over thenext decade.” [2] In Africa from Libya, Algeriaand Tunisia to Namibia and Nigeria, throughthe Persian Gulf countries to Indonesia andThailand, and beyond to India and China, the
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GNEP stirs bureaucratic visions of endlessclean power. India and China plan to multiplytheir nuclear capacity by six-fold and 8-foldrespectively,
However, the idea that nuclear energy mightbe the answer to climate change is far-fetched.As the existing generation of reactors, mostly inthe US, Europe, and Russia, reaches their “useby” date, about 80 new reactors would have tobe commissioned over the next ten years and afurther 200 in the decade after that, just tomaintain the existing nuclear contribution toworld energy needs. [3] And, according toGreenpeace, even if the world’s current 439reactors were to be doubled by 2030, carbondioxide emissions would only be cut by 5 percent and greenhouse gases by 3 per cent. Tomake a real difference on emissions wouldrequire thousands upon thousands of newreactors, something which, quite apart from ther isk factor , in engineer ing terms isinconceivable. [4]
The Bush administration’s GNEP agenda alsoincludes a technology known as ABR (AdvancedBreeder Reactor), but the ABR exists only as atheoretical proposition whose commercialdevelopment is at best decades in the future.Breeder programs, which “breed” (i.e. producemore than they start with) very pure, weapons-grade plutonium had been abandonedeverywhere save Japan on grounds of cost (fourto five times as much as conventional plants)and safety, till thus resuscitated.The GNEP switch to the world-wide promotionof the nuclear option neglects the fact that thissystem, which is to be spread around the earth,can only barely be made to function in the mostadvanced industrial countries. Finland,commencing construct ion in 2002 ofOlkiluoto-3, Europe’s first nuclear plant sinceChernobyl, has experienced engineeringproblems significant enough to delay itscompletion by two years (to 2011) and greatlyraise its cost. Sweden’s Forsmark 3 reactor issaid in 2006 to have gone within half an hour of
meltdown.
Inside the Forsmark reactor, Sweden
France’s EDF power plant spilled 75 kg ofuranium into local water systems at Tricastin inJuly 2008. In Japan in July 2007 the world’sbiggest reactor, at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa inNiigata, was struck by an earthquake 6.8 timesstronger than was allowed for by the designand it was found to have been constructeddirectly atop a fault line.
I f , despite i ts long record of nuclearengineering and its technical sophistication,even Japan makes disastrous miscalculations,can the rest of the world be expected to domuch better? Japan’s nuclear record includesserious design failures, data falsification andfabrication, cover-ups, and the failure to reportcriticality incidents and emergency shut-downs.
No state, however, is more enthusiastic thanJapan about embracing the nuclear option.Present plans cal l for nuclear powerdependence to be raised from 35 to 40 per centof electric supply. [5] More importantly, itstrives to attain the full nuclear cycle –enrichment, generation, reprocessing, andwaste disposal. METI (Ministry of Economics,Trade and Industry)’s New National EnergyPolicy of 2006 declares the goal of havingJapan become a “nuclear state” (genshiryokurikkoku). So well-recovered from its nuclear
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“allergy” is once nuclear-victim Japan that itnow sets out to lead the world into a plutonium-based future.
Already Japan possesses more than 45 metrictons of plutonium (about 6 MT in Japan itselfand 39 MT outside the country) - 750 times the60-odd kgs that North Korea might or mightnot possess, and about one fifth of globalstocks. Ignoring pleas from the Director-General of the IAEA to desist from enrichmentand reprocessing works, [6] it is about tocommence full commercial processing ofplutonium at Rokkasho in Northern Japan,reducing annually 800 tons of reactor wastes tofive more tons of plutonium, or 500 nuclearweapons-worth. This plant has already costaround 20 billion dollars to construct and isexpected to cost around 180 billion dollars over40 years of its use, thus becoming one of themost expensive industrial facilities ever built.Every day, it will discharge into the adjacentsea and sky wastes equivalent in volume to oneyear’s worth of a nuclear reactor.
Japan has also long pursued the goal of a fast-breeder plutonium reactor. It began toconstruct the Monju prototype (at Tsuruga inFukui) in 1985, but had to suspend work in1995 following a major accident and cover-up.It is not expected to resume test operationsuntil October 2008. The attraction for resource-poor Japan of a potentially eternal source ofenergy at a time of skyrocketing oil and gasprices is obvious, but the risks and the costsare also evident. According to the NuclearPower Policy Outline of 2005, it will be 2050 atthe earliest before Monju could be supplyingany electricity to the grid.
The Monju Prototype Fast BreederReactor, Fukui Prefecture
From September 2008 Japan also welcomes theAmerican nuclear aircraft-carrier GeorgeWashington to “home-port” in Yokosuka, withina few dozen kilometers of the capital. Thewelcome may be muted by the news in August2008 that the nuclear submarine, USSHouston, had been leaking radioactive materialinto Pacific waters en route to and from theport of Sasebo in southern Japan for monthsundetected.
South Korea has for the past 30 years beenfollowing Japan down the nuclear path. Havingdeveloped indigenous nuclear technology, itnow has 8 reactors under construction andanother 9 under consideration. Its plans call forelectricity generation capacity to be doubledfrom its current 30 per cent to 60 per cent by2035. The Shin Kori 3 reactor in SouthGyeongsang Province has a 1,400 KW capacity,roughly 280 times North Korea’s Yongbyon. [7]Like the US, Japan and France, Korea gears upto compete for the lucrative reactor exportmarket, and is said to enjoy good prospects ofsuccess in Turkey, Romania and Indonesia. TheKorean public appears more concerned overthe possibility of being supplied tainted beef byUS exporters than by any nuclear risk.
Yet, despite the promise of eternal green
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energy by the prophets of the nuclearrenaissance, nuclear power takes much longerthan any renewable response to globalwarming, involves significantly increasedgreenhouse gas emissions during i tsconstruction, mining, processing and disposalphases, is accompanied by unquantifiable risk(proliferation, terrorism, earthquake or othernatural catastrophe, accident), and its wastesremain toxic for millennia.
Plutonium (Pu239) has a half-life of 24,000years and depleted uranium a half-life of 4.5billion years. All nuclear countries confront theproblem of how to handle such toxicsubstances. As Britain sets about clearing upits half century of nuclear works, it faces ane s t i m a t e d $ 1 4 0 b i l l i o n c o s t f o rdecommissioning its civil nuclear works, withthe cleanup of Sellafield reprocessing plantexpected to take about 112 years. In addition,health costs now and in centuries to come areimpossible to calculate. Radiation levels tentimes normal have been reported in theSellafield vicinity, child leukaemia levels inparts of North Wales are ten times the nationalaverage, and high concentrations of thecarcinogenic iodine 129 are to be found as faraway as the coasts of Denmark and Sweden.
The US Congress in 1987 chose YuccaMountain in Nevada (160 kms northwest of LasVegas) as site for its long-term, high-levelnuclear waste repository, but after 21 years itis still hard to say when, if ever, the site willopen. The Department of Energy (DoE) says itwill cost $90 billion and projects opening in2017, but Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid(D-Nevada) says it will never open. [8] A federalcourt ruled in 2004 that it was not enough toprovide assurances against radiation risk tohumans for 10,000 years; the frame had toextend to one million years (sic). The DoE isconfident that it can meet that standard, [9] butwho can dare promise security for up to amillion years, a span as long as humanexistence itself?
Yucca Mountain, Nevada
In Japan too the search goes on for a long-termrepository. Gradually, the country’s northernand eastern districts around the Rokkashoplants are being transformed into a vast,poisonous complex, over which generation aftergeneration, for millennia, a heavy, militarizedguard must be maintained.
Bizarrely, it even seems possible now that localgovernment authorities in depopulated,mountain or coastal villages may be swayed byfiscal incentives of the most blatant and short-term political kind to embrace the nuclearwaste option, committing their home towns andvillages to become wasteland for the comingmillion years, for ever that is.
The future nuclear state can only becentralized, heavily policed or militarized, non-,if not anti-democratic, and a continuing andgrowing threat to humanity. The Bushadministration’s GNEP, belittling cost,technical feasibility, and risk, offers thenightmare prospect of the global spread ofnuclear technology and materials. The nuclearreactor is as false a response to global warming
as the nuclear weapon is to global security.
Notes
[1] Edwin Lyman and Frank N. von Hippel,“Reprocessing Revisited: The InternationalDimensions of the Global Nuclear EnergyP a r t n e r s h i p(http://www.armscontrol.org/act/2008_04/LymanVonHippel.asp ),” Arms Control Association,April 2008.[2] Emma Chanlett-Avery and Mary BethNikitin, “Japan’s Nuclear Future: Policy debate,prospects, and U.S. Interests,” CRS Report forCongress , 9 May 2008, Washington:Congressional Research Service, p. 4.[3] “Nuclear power for civilian and militaryuse,” Le Monde Diplomatique, Planet in peril,Arendal Norway, UNEP/1GRID-Arendal, 2006,p. 16.[4] One “senior US official” is quoted as sayingthat it would take between 1,000 and 2,500new reactors by 2050 to reduce global carbonemissions by 50 per cent. Kiryu Hiroto,“Samitto o genpatsu suishin no ba ni shite waikenai,” Shukan kinyobi, 27 June 2008, pp.28-29.[5] For the current figure of 35 percent:Chanlett-Avery and Nikitin, cit.[6] Mohammed Elbaradei, “Seven steps torevive world security,” The Financial Times, 2February 2005. Japan took the position that itsprogram was not new and was thereforeexempt from the call for moratorium.[7] Korea Herald, 4 June 2008.[8] Quoted in Lyman and von Hippel, and seeS e n a t o r R e i d ’ s h o m e p a g e(http://reid.senate.gov/issues/yucca.cfm ).[9] “EPA proposes radiation limits for YuccaM o u n t a i n(http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/810/4),” Sciencenow, AmericanAssociation for the Advancement of Science, 10August 2005.
Focus and author of Client State: Japan in theA m e r i c a n E m b r a c e(http://www.amazon.com/Client-State-Japan-Ame r i c a n -Embrace/dp/184467133X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1217842606&sr=8-1)(NewYork, Verso, 2007, with Japanese, Chinese andKorean editions in press). This text is an
expanded version of his August essay for theKorean vernacular newspaper, Kyunghyangsinmun, where it is to be published on 6August, “Hiroshima Day.” See also his articleon “Japan as a Plutonium Superpower(http://japanfocus.org/_Gavan_McCormack-Japan_as_a_Plutonium_Superpower)”. Posted atJapan Focus on August 4, 2008.
