A world awash in a nuclear explosive? (Plutonim)

[Oscar]

A world awash in a nuclear explosive?

[ http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/03/ ... -explosive ]

Japan is leading a global move towards dangerous reactors fueled by plutonium, Thomas Cochran and other experts say

Douglas Birch, Center for Public Integrity, March 10, 2014
[ http://www.publicintegrity.org/authors/douglas-birch ]

Cochran played a key role in killing the U.S. plutonium-based nuclear reactor program, and is now targeting Japan's.

Key findings:

[ http://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/03/ ... y-findings ]

* Japan will finish a $22-billion plutonium factory in October. In a single year, this plant in Rokkasho could produce enough of the nuclear explosive to make 2,600 bombs.

* Japan says it needs the material to fuel existing or future nuclear power plants, though all such plants are now shuttered and none will be able to burn the plutonium for many years.

* In the next 12 years, Japan will likely accumulate more plutonium than the United States has left over from the Cold War.

* Some nuclear nonproliferation experts say that due to the large production capacity of the Japanese factory, it would be like a big-box store for would-be nuclear terrorists. Its product will be extremely hard to keep track of, and once a coke-can sized quantity of plutonium is stolen, it could not be tracked.

* The United States has spent more than $850 million on radiation monitoring systems at foreign ports, in anticipation that some plutonium could eventually leak from such factories. But the systems are widely considered ineffective.

* Thomas Cochran, a longtime critic of plutonium production, has successfully demonstrated that radioactive containers can be easily smuggled past U.S. borders.

- - - -

WASHINGTON - A generation after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, the world is rediscovering the attractions of nuclear power to curb the warming pollution of carbon fuels. And so a new industry focused on plutonium-based nuclear fuel has begun to take shape in the far reaches of Asia, with ambitions to spread elsewhere - and some frightening implications, if Thomas Cochran is correct.

A Washington-based physicist and nuclear contrarian, Cochran helped kill a vast plutonium-based nuclear industrial complex back in the 1970s, and now he's at it again - lecturing at symposia, standing up at official meetings, and confronting nuclear industry representatives with warnings about how commercializing plutonium will put the public at enormous risk.

Where the story ends isn't clear. But the stakes are large.

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