Mr.
Hideyuki Ban of CNIC has served as a member of the Nuclear Power
Subcommittee of the Electricity and Gas Industry Committee under the
Advisory Committee for Natural Resources and Energy since June 2014. He
is participating in the discussions from the standpoint of a phaseout
of nuclear power, supporters of which are a small minority in the
subcommittee. This article is one in a series of reports on the work of
the subcommittee as seen through his eyes.
The
question of a video
of the deliberations not being made public, as reported in Nuke Info
Tokyo 162, has still not been resolved. The current situation is that
poor quality audio recording of the proceedings will be made
available on the Internet up to the time when the minutes of the
meetings are published. An audio live Internet broadcast is also
not provided.
In addition, discussions
in the Radioactive Wastes Working Group, on which Mr. Ban also serves
as a member, restarted on October 23 after deliberations ended
following the publication of an interim report in May.1)
This report covers deliberations in the Nuclear Power Subcommittee up to the seventh meeting.
The third meeting (July 23) heard reports from the power companies and
the host municipalities on the moves toward a reduction of dependence
on nuclear power. The fourth meeting (August 7) concerned the
maintenance of nuclear power engineers and other human resources (but
this will not be dealt with in this report). The fifth meeting (August
21) discussed maintenance of the nuclear power business (nuclear power
plants and the nuclear fuel cycle) under power industry deregulation,
which was continued in the sixth meeting (September 16). The topic of
the seventh meeting (October 2) was contributions toward the global
peaceful use of nuclear power.
Policies to support nuclear power under power industry deregulation
Up to now, Japanese consumers have been unable to choose the power
company from which they purchase their power. The system has been that,
except for large-scale customers of 50 kW and over, if you live in
Tokyo then you have no option but to contract with the Tokyo Electric
Power Company (TEPCO) for power, and if you live in Osaka then you are
forced to contract with Kansai Electric Power Company (KEPCO).
One of the election pledges of the Abe administration was the bold
implementation of power system reform. A bill on the total deregulation
of the power industry (making it possible for ordinary consumers to
contract with any power company they like) was passed into law by the
Diet, and deregulation will be implemented from 2016. A bill separating
the power generation and power transmission sectors of each of the
power companies is also scheduled to be submitted to the regular
session of the Diet in 2015, with implementation planned for 2020. It
is anticipated that these laws will help make cheap power available and
give impetus to renewable energy, which has greater support among
citizens.
The Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has always claimed that
nuclear power is cheap, but the subcommittee, while tacitly recognizing
that nuclear power will be weeded out under deregulation due to its
higher costs, is considering what the government can do to ensure the
continuing existence of nuclear power plants.
In order to continue to use nuclear power plants, it is necessary to
rebuild (replace) power plants or construct new ones. However, the cost
of building a nuclear reactor is enormous, at about 400 billion yen
each, and it is said that a competitive environment would make
investment in new reactor construction impossible. The power companies
say that they are prepared to “promote the nuclear power generation
business as private business and restructure the safe and stable supply
of Japan’s energy and the security framework” (Hideki Toyomatsu,
subcommittee's expert member, Kansai Electric Power Company), but are
demanding that the government provide institutional support to back up
this preparedness.
An example cited was the case of the Contract for Difference (CfD), now
being considered in the UK as a means to ensure the establishment of an
environment for the replacement or new construction of nuclear reactors.
2)
The
examples of loan guarantees for advanced nuclear power plants and
guarantees against construction delays for new nuclear power plant
construction that have been introduced by the US government were also
discussed. While there was no clear indication of the introduction of
such a system into Japan, it seemed that consideration was being given
to some kind of similar support measures. Even if such support measures
are introduced, citizens living close to NPSs or where they are planned
are strengthening their opposition to NPSs more than ever before. For
example, all the city assemblies around the Sendai NPS have decided
against the proposed new Unit 3 there.
At the same time, the subcommittee envisaged that the huge investments
made necessary by the strengthening of safety standards would lead to
the decommissioning of some nuclear power plants. It is possible that
some nuclear power plants that have not yet been operable for 40 years
will remain shut down. If these are decommissioned, the remaining fixed
assets would be instantly written off, resulting in large financial
losses. Examples of special measures in other countries were given as
means to avoid this. The background to these arguments is that the
government wishes to encourage the decommissioning of obsolescent
nuclear power plants in order to reduce dependence on nuclear power.
Rethinking the cost of nuclear power plants
One of the reasons why the introduction of a concrete system has not
come into view is the issue of the cost of power generation. The media
is reporting that the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI)
has begun estimations of power generation cost by different power
sources. It seems that METI will review the calculations it made in
2011. According to the estimations at that time, the cost of generation
by nuclear power was assessed at “from 8.9 yen/kWh”. For this, damages
due to the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station accident were
calculated to be 5.8 trillion yen. There is still no final settlement
for the total damages from the Fukushima nuclear accident, but since
the generation cost rises 0.1 yen for each trillion yen increase in
damages, the generation cost is assessed with the prefix “from”.
3)
Assessing the cost of power generation by nuclear power over a range is
based on the fact that the Atomic Energy Damage Compensation Act
(AEDCA) imposes unlimited liability for the accident on the power
company. Nevertheless, after the Fukushima accident had actually
occurred, new mechanisms were brought into play to avoid the collapse
of TEPCO. It appears that the government is now thinking along the
lines of a negative reform in which unlimited liability becomes limited
liability. In the case of limited liability, only a limited sum of
money is included in the generation cost of nuclear power, resulting in
a change in the direction of reducing the cost of nuclear power
generation.
If
the cost estimation includes the cheaper cost of new NPSs which meet
the new regulation, it would not be necessary to introduce a new
support system such as CfD.
Nationalization of reprocessing?
As it is government policy to maintain the nuclear fuel cycle, a
proposal was submitted to the 5th and 6th meetings to strengthen
government involvement in the trouble-ridden Rokkasho reprocessing
plant, which is still unable to function fully as expected, and to
support it by turning the facility into a government-approved
corporation. Some committee members voiced the opinion that the
reprocessing plant should be nationalized, but METI suggested the
policy of not nationalizing the facility for the reason of “making use
of private dynamism”. It is also said that the Ministry of Finance is
opposed to nationalization.
At present, the cost of reprocessing is included in electricity bills,
and each power company entrusts the funds with the public utility
foundation Radioactive Waste Management Funding and Reserve Center in
accordance with their nuclear power generating capacity. However, it is
said that even with this system to protect reprocessing, there is a
possibility that power industry deregulation will force the
reprocessing project into liquidation.
The author insists that maintaining the reprocessing project is
unnecessary, but many of the subcommittee members claim that
reprocessing is required for reasons of national policy. A proposal to
commission the reprocessing project to the private sector has also been
presented to the subcommittee. While a specific policy proposal is yet
to be put forward, in order to maintain reprocessing under the excuse
that “it will lead to benefits for the whole country”, a mechanism is
being sought for levying the cost of reprocessing widely across
consumers, including those who use renewable energy.
The spent nuclear fuel problem
The problem of spent (waste) nuclear fuel came up for discussion at the
sixth meeting, but there was no serious discussion on the handling of
the roughly 17,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel that has continued to
accumulate in the spent fuel pools at each of the nuclear power plant
sites (
Table 1).
Without the approval of the prefectures that host nuclear power plants
to store spent fuel onsite, it is necessary to construct storage
facilities outside the prefecture, but it seems that this approval will
not be easily obtained. Since the power companies are the owners of the
spent fuel, they are required to secure the storage capability. The
power companies have avoided the storage problem saying that if
reprocessing proceeds as expected, then securing new storage sites will
become unnecessary. For this reason, as we have seen with the voicing
of opinions in the subcommittee, there appears to exist the optimistic
notion that if the government will support reprocessing then this will
resolve the spent fuel storage problem.
Fast reactor or fast breeder reactor?
At the sixth meeting, mysterious documentation on Monju was handed out
by the secretariat. Handouts in the subcommittee consist of
“documentation” and “reference materials”. Both included precisely
identical nuclear fuel cycle diagrams, but in the “documentation” this
was labelled “Fast Reactor Cycle”, whereas the “reference materials”
carried the label “Fast Breeder Reactor Cycle”. Further, with reference
to the Rokkasho reprocessing plant, included in the same nuclear fuel
cycle diagram, the “documentation” labelled the plant as “In the final
testing stage”. While the “reference materials” labelled it as “In the
final testing stage: Improvement of the facility for high-level liquid
waste vitrification (scheduled for completion in October 2014)”.
The author believes that this can be taken as a formal change of policy
from the former fast breeder reactor development to fast reactor
development. Moreover, the “Monju Research Plan” announced in 2013 gave
the term “fast breeder reactor/fast reactor” showing equivalence for
both types of reactor.
The Basic Energy Plan (April 2014) positioned Monju as “an
international research base for volume reduction and reduction of the
degree of toxicity of waste materials and improvements in technology
related to nuclear non-proliferation.” Monju was constructed as a fast
breeder prototype reactor, but if it has lost its position as a breeder
reactor, it will be necessary to devise a new raison d’être for it.
That is, volume and degree of toxicity reduction. As Japan is totally
at a loss about how to resolve the high-level waste disposal problem,
if it can be said to be “useful for volume reduction”, it might then be
easier to gain acceptance for a restart of operations at Monju.
Doubts about the potential for reduction in the degree of toxicity
Reduction of volume and the degree of toxicity is nothing new. In the
latter half of the 1980s, active research efforts were made into what
was known as partitioning and transmutation research and the
Phoenix Project. Research involving international cooperation was also
carried out under the Omega Plan (A Proposal to Exchange Scientific and
Technological Information Concerning
Options
Making
Extra
Gains of
Actinides
and Fission Products Generated in the Nuclear Fuel Cycle under
OECD/+NEA International Cooperation), but had to be abandoned due to
the inability to derive practical applications.
The subcommittee documentation claims that if spent nuclear fuel from
Light Water Reactors is reprocessed and vitrified, the volume will be
reduced to one quarter of the original, and further, will be reduced to
one-seventh of the volume by the use of a fast reactor. However, it is
meaningless to compare just the volumes of the spent fuel and the
vitrified product. Uranium separated out by reprocessing is itself a
waste product, and large amounts of radioactive waste materials are
also produced in the process of reprocessing. It is the total volume of
all this waste that should be compared. It is also calculated that the
degree of toxicity after 1000 years will be twelve thousandths
(12/1000) for LWR spent fuel directly disposed of after reprocessing,
but four thousandths (4/1000) if reprocessed by fast reactor.
Using a fast reactor to bombard the spent fuel with high-energy
neutrons will theoretically cause the minor actinides (Americium and
Neptunium etc.) to fission, but this author believes that it is
actually impossible, or extremely difficult, to realize this
assumption. Whether or not the minor actinides can be fully separated
from the high-level radioactive waste liquid separated out by
reprocessing, and whether the minor actinides can be made to fission
smoothly in the fast reactor are in doubt. In some cases, there is a
fear that radionuclides with an even longer half life will be produced.
Even if the technological outlook for this is favourable, the process
of removing the minor actinides from the high-level radioactive waste
liquid and then a process for fabricating the fuel using remote
equipment would be required, necessitating a large-scale and complex
facility for realization.
The significance of using Monju for volume reduction research, from
which successful outcomes cannot be anticipated, is something that
requires a serious rethink.
Contributions to global non-proliferation?
Contributions toward global peaceful use of nuclear power was the theme
of the seventh meeting. A presentation was given by Dr. Charles D.
Ferguson, President of the Federation of American Scientists. What
remained in my impression of his presentation was the sentence, “We now
stand at the juncture of whether the world will be contaminated by the
nuclear inferno or destroyed by climate change.” That the solution for
this is nuclear power is something that I cannot accept. This author’s
position is that whatever mechanisms are introduced into nuclear power
plants, they will never be able to reduce the risk of proliferation to
zero, and climate change can be mitigated by means other than nuclear
power plants.
There was no new content concerning proliferation in the subcommittee’s
documentation. The government wishes to claim that it can contribute to
the global peaceful use of nuclear power through the export of nuclear
power plants, and the grounds for this, it was explained, was that
thoroughly ensuring peaceful use through bilateral agreements can
prevent proliferation.
This author, however, is concerned that the export of nuclear power
plants will, conversely, lead to nuclear proliferation, and not
contribute to non-proliferation. I emphasized that preparing a position
document on actual cases of bilateral agreements that allow
reprocessing will probably not contribute to non-proliferation.
(Hideyuki Ban, Co-Director of CNIC)
1) Please see the article in NIT 161 at http://www.cnic.jp/english/newsletter/nit161/nit161articles/02_HLW.html
2) http://www.meti.go.jp/committee/sougouenergy/denkijigyou/genshiryoku/pdf/005_03_00.pdf
3) http://www.cas.go.jp/jp/seisaku/npu/policy09/pdf/20111221/hokoku_kosutohikaku.pdf (In Japanese)
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