Japan's acquisition of massive amounts of plutonium exposes the entire world and its environment to the threat of the deadly substance. The Akatsuki-maru and its successors will follow one of several 17,000-mile trans-oceanic routes. An accident or attack on the ship could lead to disastrous contamination of the marine ecology and require the evacuation of populated harbors. The nations along the ship's route have both the right and the responsibility to protect the environment and public health by demanding that plutonium shipments do not enter their territorial or economic zone waters. Countries throughout Africa, South America, Asia, the Caribbean and the Pacific have requested information about the route and emergency plans for the shipment. Within Japan and internationally, citizens and anti-nuclear groups have organized to oppose the shipment. Yet the Bush administration has approved Japan's plutonium reprocessing and shipping plans, despite vocal opposition from organizations such as Greenpeace International and the Nuclear Control Institute and U.S. Senator John Glenn, D-Ohio, and Representative Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, among others.
If this shipment of plutonium goes ahead as planned, Britain's Sellafield reprocessing plant, operated by British Nuclear Fuel Ltd., will also begin returning plutonium extracted from Japanese nuclear waste. Reprocessing nuclear fuel for plutonium, one of the world's most volatile and lethal compounds, is being touted by the nuclear industry as the solution to the problem of what to do with the world's nuclear waste. Yet reprocessing plutonium greatly exacerbates the nuclear waste problem because the process of separating plutonium from other nuclear waste increases the overall volume of hazardous waste 160 times.
Japan will use the plutonium as fuel in its fast-breeder reactor in Monju. Theoretically, the reactor, which "breeds" more fuel than it uses [See Breeding Disaster," Multinational Monitor, April 1992 ], will itself eventually produce enough plutonium to make Japan self-sufficient in energy. The Japanese government, which has no oil or uranium resources, insists that it needs to go through with the plutonium reprocessing program in the interest of national security. Yet the Japanese Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Corp.'s claim that it needs plutonium from France for immediate use is based only on incomplete and highly questionable data that the plant recently released. According to Jinzaburo Takagi of the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center in Tokyo and Paul Leventhal of Nuclear Control Institute, the data appear to understate the amount of plutonium produced and overstate the amount of plutonium consumed as fuel in Japan's nuclear program, creating an artificial shortage in order to justify a "need."
This so-called "need" of the Japanese government, which is seamlessly enmeshed with the "need" of the nuclear industry for profits, is now being imposed on the rest of the world. The Akatsuki-maru plutonium is the first of between three and five plutonium shipments a year planned as part of Japan's nuclear breeder reactor program. Japan intends to ship up to 45 tons of plutonium before the year 2010 alone. Plutonium is one of the world's most toxic radioactive substances, with a half-life of 24,131 years. If released into the environment, plutonium would remain a deadly contaminant for tens of thousands of years. Plutonium oxide particles are especially dangerous, as the particles can be easily inhaled and absorbed into the food chain.
Furthermore, this shipment, and each of those which will follow, will provide enough plutonium to construct over 120 nuclear weapons. William Dircks, deputy director of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, has repeatedly warned that commercial production of plutonium is leading to an "international political and security threat" and has recommended the implementation of internationally controlled storage sites for plutonium as an alternative to reprocessing.
Despite the much heralded fall of the nuclear arms race, commercial
plutonium production threatens to overturn any hope for nuclear non-proliferation
in the coming century. Without strong opposition from the public, the post-Cold
War nuclear industry will generate more plutonium, and at a faster rate,
than the U.S. military ever did, and will transport it all over the world.
Rather than allowing the creation of a global plutonium market, citizens
groups in all nations should band together to demand that the nuclear states
discontinue all present and future plans to transport and stockpile plutonium
and enact a global ban on its production and use.n