Tokyo

Japan's bid to recycle nuclear fuel at home came closer to reality this month, with the announcement that a massive, US$27-billion recycling plant is set to begin trial runs early next year.

On 22 November, local government officials in northern Aomori, the prefecture where the plant is being built, said that they had signed a safety agreement with its operator, Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited, to allow the tests to go ahead.

The decision had been eagerly awaited by Japanese power companies, who see recycling as essential for the long-term future of the country's nuclear-power industry. Japan currently gets about one-third of its electricity from nuclear power.

Aomori had hesitated to approve the tests because of safety problems involving faulty welds and leaks of radioactive water from the plant's spent-fuel storage pool.

But earlier in November, Japan's Atomic Energy Commission endorsed the recycling plan, and Aomori's licensing decision opens the way for the plant to begin operating. The prefecture's decision is “remarkably important”, says Yohsaku Fuji, chairman of the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan.

The trial runs will last for a year and use depleted uranium, a by-product of nuclear-fuel processing in Japan, instead of spent nuclear fuel. If it is successful, the plant could start reprocessing spent fuel in 2006.

Japanese power companies plan to burn the reprocessed fuel, which contains plutonium as well as uranium, in their existing nuclear-power stations. The country eventually hopes to use the fuel in ‘fast-breeder’ reactors, although their development has been stalled since an accident at a prototype reactor in 1995.

Japan's reprocessing plans have been heavily criticized for their high costs — and because they produce material that could theoretically be used in nuclear weapons.

In addition, the plans do not address how Japan should dispose of an estimated 200 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel a year that the recycling plant can't accommodate. Japan has said this will be addressed in 2010. “The government has put off the disposal problem, which would affect Japan's entire nuclear-power policies,” says Hajimu Yamana, a nuclear-energy professor at Kyoto University.