tokyo

The Japanese government is determined to press on with the development of fast-breeder reactors, despite France's decision to close Superphénix and calls for the "dissolution" of the organization that operates Japan's Monju fast-breeder (pictured right) following a series of accidents.

At its meeting last Friday (20 June), the Atomic Energy Commission reaffirmed Japan's policy of developing a nuclear fuel cycle that will use plutonium in conventional and fast-breeder reactors. The policy had been put in doubt following a series of accidents at facilities operated by the Power Reactor and Nuclear Fuel Corporation (PNC), including a sodium leak at Monju in 1995 and an explosion at a low-level waste facility last March (see Nature 386, 746; 1997).

Some feel that the French decision, announced the day before the commission's meeting, could isolate Japan from other industrialized nations in its nuclear power strategy. But the head of the commission, Riichiro Chikaoka, who also heads the government's Science and Technology Agency (STA), which oversees PNC, declared that "the importance of our nuclear fuel cycle project has not changed [as a result of the French policy]”.

The commission's decision came only a few days after the head of a committee set up by the agency to look into reform of the PNC suggested that a revamped corporation should concentrate on research and development of fast-breeder reactors and nuclear waste disposal. Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, head of the committee and former president of Tokyo University, says that a reformed PNC should concentrate on "pragmatic" research and development. Certain activities should be privatized, transferred to other organizations or terminated, such as uranium surveys overseas and development of the advanced thermal reactor Fugen.

Yoshikawa's draft proposals, which will be finalized next month, are considerably less severe than suggestions by some politicians that PNC should be “dissolved”.

A parallel PNC reform committee of the ruling Liberal Democratic party, headed by Hidenao Nakagawa, a former director-general of the STA, is likely to recommend that PNC should be dissolved. But even this committee is expected to propose the continued development of fast-breeder reactors, according to Kaname Ikeda, director-general of STA's nuclear safety bureau.

The STA's budget for Monju will decrease next fiscal year to about ¥10 billion (US$88 million) from the current ¥13 to ¥14 billion, says Ikeda. But this is because the facility is “sleeping” following the sodium leak.

But France is the leader in fast breeder technology, and the closure of Superphénix is bound to at least cause a rethink in Japan, the only other country with a substantial fast-breeder programme, says Gerhard Heusener, who heads nuclear safety at the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Centre, and led German participation in French efforts to explore using fast breeders as plutonium incinerators.