An Energy Policy That Has to Be Rethought : Japan’s turn toward plutonium attracts world concern

Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances known. A single microgram, smaller than a speck of pollen, can cause fatal cancer if inhaled.

Plutonium, which does not occur naturally, has been sought not for its toxicity but for its fissionability. It is an essential element in the manufacture of nuclear bombs. Plutonium for American weapons has come both from military reactors built for the purpose and from the reprocessing of radioactive waste from civilian nuclear power plants.

Enriched uranium has been the ordinary fuel for these plants, and plutonium continues to be a part of the waste. Until recently, however, hope was widely entertained for a new kind of reactor, the fast-breeder reactor, that would use plutonium from reprocessed waste as its fuel, producing yet more plutonium in the process. The initial enthusiasm was understandable: The technology was like burning gas and getting, instead of just exhaust, more gas as the byproduct.

ENERGY APPETITE: There was, unfortunately, a catch or two. The reprocessing was costly and dangerous. The breeder reactor itself was extremely costly to construct, both because of the toxicity of plutonium and because of the need to use highly combustible liquid sodium as a cooling fluid. When, against earlier expectations, the price of uranium began to drop sharply, breeder reactor plans were shelved everywhere.

Everywhere except Japan. With an enormous industrial plant to power and no domestic energy sources of any consequence, the Japanese are extremely vulnerable to the vicissitudes of international energy supply, not just oil embargoes but also shortages and price fluctuations in the uranium supply. The promise of fuel producing more fuel has had, accordingly, a more lasting appeal there than elsewhere.

Japan has sent some of the waste products of its nuclear power plants along with other nuclear waste purchased from the United States to reprocessing plants in Britain and France. (Japan’s own reprocessing center, at Rokkasho in the country’s northeast, is incomplete, its construction more than a decade behind schedule, partly because of local protests.) Almost two tons of plutonium from the reprocessing is now being shipped back to Japan by sea. But the hazards of the shipment alone have aroused international opinion whose intensity has clearly caught Japan by surprise. By the end of last week, Japan’s foreign ministry was conceding that the unprecedented international protests would have to be taken into consideration by the government in the course of its annual nuclear-policy review.

The reasons for the furor are at least three: the possibility of theft of plutonium by a power bent on using it in nuclear weapons; the possibility of fire and the release of plutonium into the atmosphere; the possibility of shipwreck and the bursting, under deep-sea pressure, of the steel drums in which the plutonium is being shipped.

NUCLEAR SPECTER: In the background are two other concerns: Is Japan buying more plutonium than its infant breeder reactor program can use and planning to stockpile the rest for nuclear weapons? Is Japan--a small country with a firsthand knowledge of radiation disease unmatched in the world--postponing its own nuclear waste crisis by shipping waste overseas?

We doubt that Japan wants nuclear arms. We doubt that Japan’s scientists see the breeder reactor as an escape from the still unsolved world problem of nuclear waste. But we disagree with those, including the relevant officials in the Bush Administration, who think that plutonium can be safely transported by sea. The risks are simply too great. Unless and until Japan can do its own reprocessing on its own shores, it should shelve its breeder reactor program.