Nuclear Power in Midst of a Meltdown in Japan

When Yoshikazu Yamashita, a pig farmer on Japan’s southern island of Kyushu, heard about plans to build a nuclear reactor in his town, his first concern was for the area’s fruits, vegetables, meat and dairy products.

“We were very worried about damage to our reputation and how it might affect sales,” Yamashita, 36, recalled. “But as I studied more, I started to realize how dangerous atomic radiation is. A big accident would be devastating. . . . The people near nuclear plants . . . really have to worry.”

Yamashita’s conversion from provincial farmer to antinuclear activist--and recent success he and other residents had in defeating the reactor plan--reflects an upsurge of antinuclear sentiment that is rapidly changing the equation for this resource-poor nation’s energy future.

A series of accidents and radiation leaks this year, their impact greatly heightened by bungled cover-up attempts, has crippled a cutting-edge effort to develop plutonium as a virtually unlimited energy source. Conventional nuclear energy has taken a sharp hit too.

No one expects a formal announcement that the world’s only serious plutonium-based energy program--an ambitious bid to dramatically improve the payback from nuclear power--is dead. But Japan’s plutonium dream is suffering as never before from public suspicions, technical problems and threatened budget cuts. Its two key facilities are closed indefinitely.

“Odds are [the plutonium project] will quietly go away over a period of years. In Japan, nothing is ever canceled outright,” said a U.S. government official who asked not to be identified.

The latest nuclear stumbles--in the wake of economic woes and scandals over bribery, government incompetence and corporate corruption--have further tarnished Japan’s fading 1980s image as a land of superior technology harnessed by super-competent bureaucrats and business genius.

But the fallout is more concrete than that. It undercuts Japan’s effort to fight global warming and drags out its reliance on Middle Eastern oil, casts a cloud over China’s ambitious nuclear plans and will probably send multinational energy corporations back to the drawing board with billion-dollar schemes for building nonnuclear power plants throughout Asia.

That’s because the plutonium fiasco has triggered possibly insurmountable public opposition to nuclear energy of any kind in Japan, which has carefully plotted a boost in the percentage of its electricity produced by nuclear reactors to 42% by 2010, from about 33% today. That goal is officially unchanged, but analysts say fierce opposition to new plants means no increase is likely.

“It’s relatively easy to get approval from local residents to add another reactor on the property of existing plants, because nuclear facilities are already there,” said Kazuya Fujime, managing director of the Institute of Energy Economics, a private think tank supported by energy-producing and -consuming firms. “But it’s almost impossible to get approval from residents for construction in a new place.”

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That means that although some plant construction over the next dozen years is likely, it will probably only be enough to keep nuclear power steady at the current level of about one-third of electric supply, Fujime said.

Thus Japan, whose huge economy already devours 10% of the world’s oil, will need to import and burn more fossil fuels in coming decades than it had planned.

The Institute of Energy Economics forecasts nuclear power capacity in 2010 will fall about 12,000 megawatts short of the government’s goal. Making up the shortfall would take the equivalent of 7.3% of Japan’s 1995 oil imports, or about 0.5% of global 1995 oil production. The shortfall actually would be covered by a combination of coal, natural gas and oil, Fujime said.

Greater consumption of fossil fuels adds not only to air pollution but also to the risk of global warming. The nuclear energy shortfall will make it “extremely difficult” for Japan to honor international pledges to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions to fight the global warming threat, Fujime said.

Koof Kalkstein, a Boston Consulting Group energy specialist, predicted that the biggest economic impact from Japan’s nuclear energy shortfall will be to draw billions of dollars of investment into huge natural gas projects in countries such as Malaysia and Indonesia.

Japan’s nuclear troubles may also bode ill for China, which now has just two nuclear plants but aims to build about 100 more by 2050 to become the largest user in the world. It will need help financing nuclear power and to sign up enough foreign partners to assist with the technology, Kalkstein said.

For U.S. business, troubles in Asia’s nuclear programs might boost the rewards of investing in new technologies for high-efficiency use of natural gas and cleaner burning of coal, Kalkstein said. “As development takes place in Asia, those things will be more attractive,” he said.

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It is easy enough to see why the plutonium dream is so attractive to Japan’s long-term planners.

Conventional nuclear reactors derive their energy from a kind of uranium called U235, which consists of less than 1% of the natural uranium found in ore. The rest is a nonfissionable isotope called U238, which normally is worthless for producing energy.

In the process of running nuclear power plants, some U238 is converted to a kind of fissionable plutonium, Pu239. Normally part of the waste from nuclear plants, this plutonium can be separated out and burned in so-called fast-breeder reactors, ultimately making it possible to extract at least 10 times more energy from any given amount of uranium than is possible with conventional reactors.

The term “fast breeder” for reactors comes from their use of fast-moving neutrons--a type of subatomic particle--to breed more plutonium fuel than is used up. Japan’s aim has been to build commercially viable fast-breeder reactors that would begin operating around 2030.

If the plutonium program ultimately succeeds, it could vastly increase the amount of electricity that can be extracted from the world’s uranium supplies. It would also make an important contribution to the world’s knowledge of nuclear energy’s potential.

But this kind of project “is expensive, it’s technically very difficult to do and Japan is the only country that still thinks it’s a good idea,” a U.S. government official said.

Success would also mean that Japan--or any country that eventually adopted the technology--would hold large quantities of plutonium that could be used for nuclear weapons. It already holds about 16 tons.

Plutonium can be turned into bombs with little or no additional purification, whereas reactor-grade uranium cannot be used for bombs without first undergoing a technically difficult concentration process.

“Relying on a fuel that can be used for nuclear weapons is not a good idea. That’s my basic position,” said Jinzaburo Takagi, Japan’s most prominent antinuclear activist and a former professor of nuclear chemistry.

The recent meltdown of public and political support for the plutonium program began with a March 11 fire, explosion and radiation leak at the Tokaimura nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, 70 miles northeast of Tokyo.

This accident, which exposed 37 workers to low-level radiation, shut down Japan’s key facility for extracting plutonium from spent nuclear fuel. The Power Reactor & Nuclear Fuel Development Corp., or PNC, the government agency that runs Japan’s plutonium program, rated the accident a 3 on the international 1-7 “nuclear event scale,” making it Japan’s worst nuclear accident.

By comparison, the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania was rated a 5, and the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in the former Soviet Union topped the scale at 7.

After the accident, the PNC said the initial fire was out at a time when management actually had not checked on it. The fire, by itself relatively minor, was followed 10 hours later by the explosion. The scandal worsened with other disclosures, among them that PNC’s in-house investigator had shredded photos of the scene.

Trouble struck again on April 14 when the Fugen reactor near the Japan Sea town of Tsuruga sprang a leak of radioactive tritium. Eleven workers were exposed to small amounts of radiation--yet the PNC waited 30 hours to report the incident.

That prompted an angry blast from Prime Minister Ryutaro Hashimoto, who told reporters: “I saw the date of the accident and the date the PNC reported. It’s completely hopeless!”

The PNC subsequently disclosed there had been 11 tritium leaks over the last 30 months that it had not reported on the grounds that they posed no threat to the environment.

These failures occurred while memories of another were still fresh: an accident on Dec. 8, 1995, in which a sodium leak shut down a prototype plutonium reactor, also located near Tsuruga. That fast-breeder reactor--named Monju after a Buddhist goddess of wisdom who harnessed the power of a lion--is central to Japan’s entire plutonium effort.

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The sodium leak was less serious than the scheme by plant executives to hide a videotape of the damage and edit another to downplay the seriousness of the incident. Then last year, the investigator who unmasked the Monju cover-up, Shigeo Nishimura, 49, committed suicide by jumping from the roof of a Tokyo hotel, leaving notes lamenting the distress his investigation had caused colleagues.

“If PNC had learned their lesson from Monju . . . [the Tokaimura cover-up] would not have happened,” said Miwako Ogiso, a leader of a local residents organization seeking to prevent Monju from reopening.

The recent incidents, analysts say, have sharply raised the chances that Monju will never reopen--and without knowledge gained from operating that facility, it is almost impossible for the fast-breeder reactor program to move forward.

Several anti-plutonium activists are already declaring victory. “There is no possibility whatsoever” that Monju will ever start up again, Ogiso said.

But supporters of the project are far from conceding defeat.

Ryuichi Mukaibo, a PNC spokesman, said that the plutonium program is still very much alive--and notes that it has faced serious delays before. The original goal was to open Monju in 1978, he said, but it didn’t start operating until 1994.

“We in Japan consume more than 10% of all the petroleum produced in the world. When we look at China and India, and the growing countries of East Asia, we don’t think we can get more than that share. . . . I personally believe that some technologically advanced country must show that plutonium can be safely burned.”

Etsuko Kawase of The Times’ Tokyo Bureau contributed to this report.