Push to tie up with US for advanced nuclear technology
Tokyo is embarking on a series of ambitious next-generation nuclear projects that could power Japanese industry for decades to come and go some way towards erasing the blot on its reputation caused by the Fukushima disaster.
A key element in the development of future nuclear energy technology will involve collaboration with scientists and companies in the United States, with Koichi Hagiuda, Japan’s minister of industry, holding talks with US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on January 6 and agreeing to cooperate in the development of plutonium-burning fast reactors and advanced energy plants based on small modular reactors.
In its Sixth Strategic Energy Plan, unveiled in October, the Japanese government made it clear that it intended to move on from events in northeast Japan in the aftermath of the March 2011 magnitude-9 earthquake, which triggered a tsunami that caused the meltdown of three of the six reactors at the Fukushima plant.
Fukushima is rated as the second-worst nuclear disaster in history, after Chernobyl, and thousands of people are still unable to return to their communities to this day due to elevated levels of radiation in surrounding areas.
But in its outlook for the future, the government’s plan states “stable use of nuclear power will be promoted on the major premise that public trust in nuclear power should be gained and that safety should be secured”.
Successive Liberal Democratic Party governments – frequently accused of having close ties to the nation’s influential power firms – have quietly committed themselves to nuclear energy, but that is now being ramped up with the new plans.
The support for nuclear energy was being driven by Japan’s need to dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions and to secure energy that was not dependent on imports from other parts of the world, which made it easy to disrupt in the event of a geopolitical crisis, said Tomoko Murakami, manager of the nuclear energy group at the Institute of Energy Economics, Japan.
“The Japan Atomic Energy Agency [JAEA] and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries are cooperating with US nuclear power start-up TerraPower simply because they have the required skills and knowledge on fast reactors,” she said.
The first stage of the alliance will see the Japanese government investing some 900 million yen (HK$61 million) on upgrading the AtheNa sodium experimental plant for fast reactor research in Ibaraki prefecture.
Work is already under way at the plant, operated by the JAEA, and the memorandum of understanding on technological cooperation with TerraPower is to be signed before the end of this month.
The system is designed to generate power by extracting heat from a reactor core with liquid sodium.
The facility will also be used in the joint development of a next-generation fast reactor with the US, while work is also under way at another site, Joyo, where a test nuclear reactor utilises sodium as a coolant and to determine the impact of neutrons on fuels and other equipment.
Earlier research with France on fast reactors was put on hold, but the US has now stepped into the broader effort to promote a nuclear fuel cycle, in part because both governments are looking for ways to reduce the volume and toxicity of high-level radioactive waste generated from power plants.