Japan's longstalled nuclear power project gets boost

Japan's long-stalled controversial plan to use recycled fuel in nuclear power reactors received a boost after a rural town accepted the method despite nationwide safety concerns.

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The mayor of Genkai in southern Japan and the local governor said they accepted a plan by regional power utility Kyushu Electric Power Co. to begin using uranium-plutonium mixed oxide (MOX) fuel at one of its reactors.

"We are assured that the plan is safe," Saga governor Yasushi Furukawa told a news conference, after Toshihiro Nikai, the minister of economy, trade and industry, inspected the reactor in Saga prefecture and met local administrators.

"Minister Nikai gave us a strong message that the government would do its best to ensure safety at the reactor," he added Sunday.

Kyushu Electric plans to start operating a reactor at its Genkai nuclear power plant with MOX fuel in the business year to March 2011. It will become Japan's first plant to use MOX fuel.

In the so-called pluthermal process, plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel is combined with uranium oxide to create MOX fuel, which is then burned in light-water reactors.

The Japanese government has been pushing the pluthermal process since 1997 as the center of its nuclear-fuel recycling policy to make up for the country's poor reserves of natural resources.

Its plan to use a fast-breeder reactor, which produces more plutonium than it uses, had been suspended due to a sodium leak accident in 1995 at its pilot plant Monju.

Plutonium can be used to produce nuclear bombs and its management is a cause for concern, particularly among ecologists and peace activists.

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(Ads by Google)Japan relies on nuclear power for one third of its electricity, and the ratio is expected to go up to 40 percent by 2010.

The Japanese electric industry has plans to use the pluthermal method at 16-18 nuclear reactors in the country by the year to March 2011. But they have been stalled by a series of accidents and scandals.

Tsunehisa Katsumata, who heads the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan, welcomed Genkai's move as "an extremely significant step forward."

In September last year, Kyushu Electric obtained central government approval to install a pluthermal reactor at the plant, pending consent from local administration.

In August 2004, a steam burst from a ruptured pipe killed five workers at a nuclear power plant run by Kansai Electric Power Co. in central Japan, forcing its pluthermal project to be postponed indefinitely.

Tokyo Electric Power Co. planned to use MOX fuel at plants in Niigata and Fukushima prefectures in northern Japan.

But local residents voted against the Niigata plan and the governor of Fukushima scrapped the project in his prefecture after the company's cover-up of nuclear reactor faults at its plants came to light.

© 2006 AFP