[lbo-talk] Gavan McCormack on the Japanese nuclear threat

[Lajany Otum]

Japan's Nuclear Crisis: A Wakeup Call for the World Back 
Mar. 14, 2011:By Gavan McCormack -- After years of warnings about  the "North 
Korean nuclear threat" now suddenly the entire Northeast  Asian region is 
subjected to the "Japan nuclear threat," just as North  Korea has been warning 
for years. Apart from the Fukushima meltdown  risk, how safe is Japan's 
plutonium mountain, accumulating in the waste  piles and underground parking 
places outside reactors up and down the  country, 50 odd tons of radioactive 
sludge, and at the vast repositories  at Rokkasho, just up the road from 
Fukushima, which has a planned  reprocessing capacity of 800 tons of spent fuel 
per year, including  eight tons of plutonium?

 
It is surely time now to revisit, debate, and in due course reverse  the 
policies adopted especially in the New National Energy Policy of  2006, which 
defined the future of the country as a "nuclear state"  (genshiryoku rikkoku). 
The bureaucrats have for decades struggled to  overcome Japan's "Hiroshima 
syndrome..." (See related McCormack 2007  essay, "Japan as a Plutonium 
Superpower," here)

 
The cargo cult bureaucratic vision of eternal energy security drives  not just 
the conventional nuclear reactors but the push for full  commercial 
reprocessing, fast breeders, MOX, Monju, etc. The recycling  of plutonium in the 
form of MOX fuel went against sound international  advice and now MOX has 
multiplied and plutonium-ized the risk.

 
In light of the disaster unfolding in Fukushima Japan and the rest of  the 
civilian nuclear power countries, Japan should now move toward a  democratic 
consensus on the way forward choosing between three main  options:

 
1) Maintain but reinforce (and possibly expand) civilian nuclear power programs 
by making them "safe";

 
2) Wind down nuclear power but hold power output in the remaining  plants to 
roughly current levels in the grid (phasing out the old  reactors and applying 
new standards to the existing), including  quake-proofing to magnitude 9 all 
those plants to be maintained, while  finding supplementary energy sources;

 
or

 
3) Set a target date for the abolition of civilian nuclear power in  the name of 
a dramatically different energy policy that shifts toward  renewables.

 
The debate is fundamentally about the course of civilization, hinted at by 
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who described over the weekend Japan's nuclear 
power crisis as a "turning point for  the world," adding that Germany "could not 
carry on as usual given that  an explosion at a nuclear plant happened despite 
Japan's high safety  standards" (indirect quote). 

 
Gavan McCormack is an emeritus professor of Australian National  University, a 
coordinator of the Asia-Pacific Journal, and author of Client State: Japan in 
the American Embrace.

 
This article was published by JapanFocus on 14 March 2011. 
http://japanfocus.org/events/view/49