Japan nuclear waste plan: ‘regeneration’

Monday, June 8, 1998 | 10:36 a.m.

TOKYO -- Gov. Bob Miller never misses an opportunity to get new perspectives on how to deal with the nuclear waste issue. Today at the American Embassy in Japan was no different.

Apologizing in advance to members of the 10-member contingent who had come to talk tourism, Miller picked the brain of Milton Eaton, a representative of the U.S. Department of Energy stationed at the Tokyo embassy.

How, Miller asked, do the Japanese deal with the problem of nuclear waste?

"They'll regenerate it," Eaton said. "It's an option that makes absolutely no economic sense."

Nevertheless, Eaton said, that's the plan -- at least on paper. To regenerate nuclear waste, special plants would have to be built to extract usable uranium and plutonium from spent fuel.

Eaton said Japan's nuclear power plants currently store waste on site, just as is done in the United States. But in the United States, the federal government is attempting get legislation approved to allow the shipment of nuclear waste to Yucca Mountain, northwest of Las Vegas. Miller actively has fought to block the storage of nuclear waste on Nevada soil.

But Eaton seemed skeptical that the reprocessing proposal ever would come to fruition. He said the last expansion of a nuclear power plant in Japan occurred in 1975 when new units were added to an existing facility. The Japanese have considered burying their nuclear waste in a repository like the one planned at Yucca Mountain. To do so, however, would require the construction of a facility in a geologically safe area.

"And in Japan," Eaton said, "there's no such thing in these volcanic islands."

It would be well into the 21st century before Japan could have a reprocessing plant available.

On another nuclear issue, Embassy staff members conducting a briefing for the Nevada contingent explained Japan's stance in the conflict between India and Pakistan.

Larry Greenwood, economic minister for the Embassy, said Japan has taken an active role in defusing the dispute. Japan, he said, is leading an effort to bring economic sanctions against the two countries for their testing of nuclear weapons.

Japan and the United States, Greenwood said, are emerging as the world leaders taking a stand against the proliferation of weapons in that portion of the world.