 There's two thank yous I'd like to give before I plow into the details of this report. The first one is to the MacArthur Foundation for funding this research. A lot of this research was based on meetings in Japan on Japanese primary sources. My Japanese extends to about five words. So the MacArthur Foundation enabled me to do a lot more in terms of translation. And I'd also like to thank two Japanese speaking interns who did a tremendous amount for this project. Yukari Sekiguchi who's here and Erin Weeks who is not. But you know those two deserve a huge amount of thanks from me. Into the details then. As many of you know when you irradiate nuclear fuel in a nuclear reactor. Plutonium is inevitably created as a byproduct of that operation. Now in many countries around the world including the United States. That spent nuclear fuel is basically just left in interim storage. And the plutonium is left in situ with the long term goal eventually of burying that nuclear waste in a repository. A small group of countries have chosen to try to extract that plutonium from their spent fuel. And the name given to that process that chemical process of extracting the plutonium is reprocessing. And reprocessing has always been a very controversial way of managing spent fuel. For various reasons but for today's purposes. Because that plutonium that you extract can be used for at least two different purposes. You can use it to build to fabricate more nuclear fuel but you can also use it for nuclear weapons. And so for that reason reprocessing has always attracted some degree of controversy. As my colleague Toby mentioned Japan is the only non-nuclear weapons state with an advanced reprocessing program. Now to date an awful lot of reprocessing of Japanese spent fuel has taken place abroad. Particularly in France and the UK. And indeed there is about 36 tons of Japanese plutonium sitting in those states. There's also 11 tons of plutonium sitting in Japan at the moment. Interestingly and I'm going to return to this point later. There's still nuclear waste that's sitting abroad particularly in the UK and to a lesser extent in France. That Japan is also obliged to accept from abroad. And not all of that nuclear waste has been returned. Now going forward Japan's plan is now to reprocess all future reprocessing to take place in Japan. In a facility known as Rockasha reprocessing plant. Prior to the Fukushima accident this industrial scale facility operated very briefly in testing. There are a number of technical problems and it was shut down for solving those technical problems prior to the accident. Japan Nuclear Fuel Limited, JNFL which is the company that owns Rockasha now says that it solved those problems and Rockasha is ready to operate. And it's now waiting to go ahead from the regulator the Nuclear Regulatory Authority. Nominally Japan's plan, JNFL's plan is to operate Rockasha in March 2016. In practice it's very likely that there will be further delays to that target. But the basic concern is that the process of putting reactors online post Fukushima is moving at an even slower pace. And so the concern that I lay out in these reports is that Japan is not going to be able to use all of the plutonium that's produced in Rockasha because it simply doesn't have enough reactors to do so. Now I think it's worth pointing out as many of you will be aware that all of the plutonium that Japan produces will be under IAEA safeguards. And then I think indeed Japan deserves great credit for its commitment to safeguards today. And actually I should also say that my concern is not that Japan is going to use this plutonium to build a nuclear weapon. I think it's very unlikely. My concerns are much more about the precedent that stockpiling plutonium would set for the non-proliferation regime, that it could exacerbate regional tensions and that it could create nuclear security risks. But I'm not going to go into depth on why plutonium stockpiling is a bad thing because everyone involved in this says it's a bad thing. There's no dispute about that. Japan's policy is very, very clearly not to produce plutonium that has no purpose. That's something the government has said repeatedly. The United States, which is directly involved in this for reasons I'm going to spell out later, also has a policy against stockpiling plutonium. And actually a whole group of reprocessors have agreed to plutonium management guidelines that are published in an IAEA document called Infcirc 549. And that says that plutonium production and demand should be kept in balance. So all of this kind of raises a question. If no one wants to stockpile plutonium, if everyone has a policy against stockpiling plutonium, why is there a risk that's going to happen? And the report really argues that from the standpoint of its domestic politics that's pushing Japan towards the risk of stockpiling plutonium, and then the policy brief, the outlook focuses much more on possible solutions. So let me talk a bit about these domestic politics that I argue are so central to what's going on in Japan. We don't have to speculate about what would happen if Japan tried to give up reprocessing, because Japan has tried to give up reprocessing three years ago in the summer of 2012. Back then, after the Fukushima accident, the Democratic Party of Japan, the DPJ-led government under Prime Minister Noda for most of that period, had an energy review. And that energy review reached the conclusion that Japan was going to phase out nuclear energy by the 2030s while continuing to reprocess. And this on the face of it was a nonsensical policy. If you're giving up nuclear energy, if you're turning all your reactors off, why would you continue to reprocess? And the answer is that that policy only devised at the very last minute. Prior to that, it appeared that Japanese policy would be to phase out nuclear energy and not to reprocess. But there was a huge backlash by the local communities that surround the plant. Rokashou Village, where the reprocessing plant is based, and Amori Prefecture, where Rokashou Village is. Perhaps surprisingly, but it's certainly the case, these host communities support the operation of the reprocessing plant very strongly. For at least two reasons. They stand to benefit financially from the reprocessing plant. The reprocessing plant is in fact was originally enshrined as the central government's development plan for this region. And there's also about 3,000 tons of spent fuel sitting at the plant waiting to be reprocessed. And there's concerns amongst the local communities that if the plant is not reopened, then that spent fuel is never going to be removed. And when it looked like the DPJ government back in the summer of 2012 was going to scrap reprocessing, the prefecture and the village issued a series of threats to the central government. And the most important of these threats, at least in their mind, was that if you the central government don't open this reprocessing plant, we're not going to allow any more nuclear waste to be imported from Britain or France. And they have the power to do this because the governor of Al Moray controls the ports in the prefecture. He gets to say yes or no to where the ships can use those ports. And indeed in the 1990s on two occasions a governor of Al Moray actually prevented for a few days a British ship and a French ship from docking. So this isn't just a kind of hypothetical threat, this has been exercised before. The second threat which attracted more importance internationally was prior to all of this spent fuel being moved into Al Moray in 1998 I think it was. The governor of Al Moray got a promise from the utilities that if the plant wasn't open they would have to remove all of the spent fuel from Al Moray. And Al Moray was very, and Rokasha Village were very open in saying if you don't open the plant you have to take all the spent fuel back. And these two threats I think the evidence is very clear and I argue in a great deal of depth in the report. These two depths I think threats were key to forcing the central government to back down and not phase out reprocessing and continue reprocessing. I think there's some more nuance here. I mean it is certainly true that the DPGA government did themselves no favors in the way they went about this process. For various kind of contingent reasons the question of the fuel cycle was really only considered very late in the game. So it's certainly the case the DPGA government didn't try to develop a serious plan to stop reprocessing. But I have to say it's also difficult for me how to see how a plan would have overcome these threats that I'm talking about. There were other difficulties too with stopping reprocessing that I discuss in the report. Again many connected to domestic politics. And I think a useful concept here is the concept of entrapment. This was originally invented by the British political scientist William Walker to explain why the UK was unable to stop reprocessing even after the UK program made no sense. And his point was basically that the commitments that the United Kingdom made to get the program started had pretty much prevented the program from being undone. And I think a similar process has occurred in Japan. The specific mechanisms for entrapment are different in Japan as in the UK. But I think there's clear entrapment in Japan. So I think for planning purposes I'm assuming that Rokasha will be opened in about three years from now. And the goal is to ramp it up to full production over the course of about five years. So say eight years from now, which I think is kind of a reasonable time horizon, the question is how much plutonium is Japan likely to be able to consume. So now I'll turn to that question. Japan's policy has changed since 2012. The new LDP government under Prime Minister Abe now supports both nuclear power and reprocessing and says it plans to burn all the plutonium that's produced in its reactors. But Japan now faces tremendous challenges in restarting its reactors. From September 2013 to August 2015, there were no operating nuclear power reactors in Japan. Last month in August, the first of the units was ready to restart after this very extensive review process by the new Japanese regulator, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority. So today we have one reactor operating in Japan and then a second restart is expected next month. Now the Federation of Electric Power Companies, which is the umbrella for all of the individual utilities in Japan, has a plan for how it's going to use all of the plutonium that's produced in Rokkashow as well as the plutonium that needs to be imported used from the British and French plutonium that was separated in Britain and France. And its plan calls for 16 to 18 reactors to be used for that purpose. And the plutonium will be fabricated into something called MOX fuel which is mixed oxide fuel and will be burnt in these conventional power reactors. And there's four different challenges to MOX burning. Firstly, the utility actually has to decide it wants to restart the reactor in question. There will be some reactors in Japan that are not restarted because the costs, because they've been decided to be decommissioned. Secondly, the new regulator, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority, has to give safety approval to the plant restarting. The third and fourth barriers to restart or relate to domestic politics. And this is something that is, it's not exactly unique to the Japanese system, but it's certainly much stronger in Japan than anywhere else, which is the operator, the utility that owns a reactor will sign something called a safety agreement with the local community. And this is not a legally binding agreement, this is a politically binding agreement, but it might as well be legally binding given the extent to which everyone always adheres to these safety agreements. And basically, these safety agreements require the utility to seek the consent of the local authority for major changes in reactor operation. And in particular, you generally have to get the consent from the local mayor of the town or the village where the reactor is located, and the consent of the governor. So in fact, to burn plutonium-based fuel, to burn MOX, you need two different types of permission. You need the permission, sorry, you need consent to restart the reactor. And you need consent to use plutonium-based fuels. And those are the third and fourth conditions you need to be able to restart the reactors. So as part of the research, I go through each of the 16 to 18 reactors that are earmarked for MOX burning and I'll ask the question, how many of them are likely to be able to consume plutonium by eight years from now? Well, all of these reactors lie on a spectrum. There are some reactors that are absolutely, definitely not going to be burning plutonium eight years from now. There are some reactors that are very likely to be burning plutonium eight years from now, and there's a whole series of reactors that lie in the middle. Let me kind of highlight three just as examples to give you the challenges associated with restarting reactors. Firstly, TEPCO, Tokyo Electric Power Company, was committed to burning plutonium in three to four of its reactors. One of those reactors was going to be at Fukushima Daiichi and possibly a second one was going to be at Fukushima Daiichi, though that had never, that hadn't been decided. Well, four of the units at Fukushima Daiichi were destroyed in the accident, and TEPCO has since announced a decision to decommission the other two reactors. So clearly none of those reactors can be used for MOX burning. Another example, a reactor called Suruga-2, which is owned by the Japan Atomic Power Company. The regulator has concluded that Suruga-2 is built on top of an active fault, which under new Japanese regulations would preclude Suruga-2 from reopening. Now, the power company that owns this JAPC is contesting that decision, but my sense is it's pretty unlikely that the NRA is going to reverse itself on this one. So again, Suruga-2 is another reactor that's not going to be used for MOX burning. Completely different problem arises in another reactor called Hama-Oka-4. This reactor is, in that case, the governor of Shizuoka Prefecture, has actually retracted permission to burn MOX. That permission was given before the Fukushima accident, and since the Fukushima accident, he has described the agreement to burn MOX as a void, or hakushi, to use the Japanese term. I could go on and on and on through different reactors, telling you which ones I think are likely to restart, which ones are less likely to restart, which ones in the middle. But anyway, the bottom line is that my analysis is the most likely case is that by 2023, eight years from now, eight or nine of the reactors earmarked for only eight or nine out of the 16 to 18 of the reactors earmarked for plutonium burning will be operational. So if Japan is operating Rokashoa full capacity by then, and at least some Japanese reactors are burning some of the plutonium from Britain and France, so they can't burn Japanese plutonium, my estimate is within eight years Japan plutonium stockpile could be growing by about two and a half tons of fissile plutonium annually. This number here, fissile plutonium, the MOX burning plan by the Japanese utilities, is given in terms of fissile plutonium. So there's, for technical reasons I'm not going to go into, only some of the plutonium isotopes are included in this MOX burning plan. But as I say, I think in the most likely case, there's a shortfall of about two and a half tons of fissile plutonium annually. Production exceeds demand by that amount. Even in the best case that I can imagine there's still a shortfall, though a smaller one. Now, the Federation of Electric Power Companies issued a statement at the end of last year announcing that the MOX burning plan was going to be further delayed from the 2015 target. And in that statement they hinted though did not say explicitly that they would try to find additional reactors to add to the plan to burn MOX. And it might be possible to do that over a long time horizon. But as I'm not going to go into a huge amount of depth here, but as I argue in the report, I think adding new reactors to the MOX burning plan is very, very difficult to do within the course of eight years. It's taken Japan, it's 15 or 20 years to get the MOX burning plan set up in the first place. So these are not changes that can be made quickly. And I can discuss further why I think that's a challenge, but I think it's going to be very, very hard to add new reactors to the plan in the short term. So what can be done about this problem? Well, again, I'm not going to highlight all of the different solutions that I suggest in the report, but there's three different key steps that I want to highlight here today. Firstly, I think the Japanese government has to take ownership of this problem and has to say we the Japanese government are going to make sure we don't produce plutonium we can't use. And historically the Japanese government has shown some reluctance to involve itself in the details of reprocessing. It says, look, the spent fuel, the plutonium is privately owned by the utilities. They're the ones making the decisions to reprocess. We don't interfere with this private activity. The problem I have with that argument is it's also the case that reprocessing is Japan's national policy. And for various legal reasons it's impossible for the utilities to have any other option other than reprocessing. So I don't see any solution to this problem that doesn't involve the Japanese government taking ownership of the problem. And the good news here is there are publicly announced discussions about the future of JNFL, the company that owns the reprocessing plant. And there are public discussions that the Japanese government is leading about whether there needs to be a different model for managing JNFL. Actually these discussions have started since I wrote the report, so you won't find the mentioned in the report. But I think this is a very, I think this is a positive move. I think that some form of greater government control over JNFL would be a good step, a good way of not just saying we're taking ownership of the problem, but actually creating the practical mechanisms to do so. Secondly, and this is where the US comes in, I would like to see, I suggest, a politically binding agreement between the Japanese government and the US government over reprocessing. The place where this comes from is that because so much of Japanese reactor technology and reactor fuel is based on American designs, Japan needs the US permission to reprocess spent fuel. And when Japan and the US negotiated a nuclear cooperation agreement in 1988, the US gave Japan what's called long-term programmatic consent to reprocess. There's only two nuclear cooperation agreements in which the US has given this permission to Japan and then to Euratom, the European atomic energy community. So this long-term programmatic consent that was given in 1988 was very, very unusual. What's interesting about the current timing is that the first 30-year term of the US-Japan agreement expires in July 2018. And the two sides have a decision to make. If they don't do anything, the agreement will continue in force in its current form. But if either side requests a renegotiation, then it has to be renegotiated. Now, to my knowledge, neither side has officially announced their position on what they want to happen. But my guess is, given the complexity of renegotiating the agreement, given the possibility of congressional interference, my guess is that Japan will want to just keep the agreement in its current form. I believe the US should agree to that request in return for a politically binding side agreement on plutonium to ensure that the long-term programmatic consent that the US has given Japan is not used to stop pal plutonium that can't be used. And specifically to operationalize that, I would argue there's three different steps, three different provisions that could be included in this side agreement. Firstly, Japan, although Japan says it won't produce plutonium, it can't use. Japan doesn't assign a time limit to that. So if Japan separates plutonium today and there's a plan to use that plutonium 20 years from now, that plutonium is not considered to be excess, even though there's a very long time between production and usage. One thing that Japan could include in this side agreement is a time limit between the production of new plutonium and its usage. I suggest five years in the paper, but that would have to be negotiated between the two sides. Secondly, I argue that Japan should include a pledge to only operate rock ashow at a throughput that allows all of the plutonium produced in rock ashow to be used. So if Japan can burn four tons of plutonium per year from rock ashow, then rock ashow should only be used to produce four tons of plutonium per year. Thirdly, Japan can't use any of the plutonium produced in rock ashow until its fuel fabrication plant, Jmox, comes online. You've actually got to reprocessing plants by themselves, don't produce finished fuel, they produce plutonium, that in Japan's case is mixed with uranium, but that has to be fabricated into fuel. And currently, Jmox is supposed to come online about 18 months after rock ashow. Now again, in practice, the restart for rock ashow is likely to be delayed, and the restart of Jmox is likely to be delayed. But even if they're delayed by the same amount, Jmox will still come online about 18 months after rock ashow. And since Japan cannot use any plutonium until Jmox is ready, I argue that Japan should commit not to operating rock ashow until Jmox is ready. The third big area that I want to highlight is Japan should give itself the option to move to the once-through fuel cycle in the future. So at the moment, Japan's entire nuclear program is based around the assumption that spent fuel will eventually be reprocessed. And even though I'm not a fan of reprocessing, I accept that in the real world it's going to continue for some time. But what Japan could do while continuing to reprocess is give itself, give a future government the option to move to not reprocessing, just storing spent fuel pending its ultimate disposal. There's non-proliferation reasons for doing that, but there's also just good governance reasons for doing that. You know, let me just highlight one reason. Mox fuel that has been irradiated in a reactor, spent mox, is not due to be reprocessed in rock ashow. It's too radioactive, rock ashow is just not designed to handle spent mox. Japan was already started to irradiate mox fuel, and it's going to produce a lot more in the future. And Japan's plan to handle that mox fuel is to build a secondary processing plant in the future. Now that's a risky project. There is a distinct probability that that will fail, because the diet will refuse to fund it, because local communities won't accept it. So given that Japan is going to have spent fuel that can't be reprocessed in rock ashow, and given that there is a chance that it won't build a second reprocessing plant to handle this spent fuel, I think just from a good governance perspective is there a sense to develop an alternative option for handling spent fuel. And specifically there are three steps that I think make a lot of sense in that regard. Firstly, like every responsible nuclear state, Japan is collecting money that's to be used for disposing of nuclear waste. And legally that money can only be used at the moment for disposing of reprocessing waste. It can't be used to dispose of unreprocessed spent fuel. So one thing Japan could do is to change the law to allow that fund to be used for both the disposal of reprocessing wastes and the disposal of unreprocessed spent fuel. Second, Japan is currently trying to locate a geological repository for burying reprocessing wastes. Let's argue that that repository should be licensed, should be designed and licensed for both reprocessing wastes and spent fuel. And thirdly, Japan in the short term needs to create additional storage space for spent fuel. One of the drivers for reprocessing is that there's just nowhere else for the spent fuel to go. In the US we handle this problem with something called dry cask storage. Spent fuel gets removed out of reactor pools after a number of years and put in these big steel or concrete or concrete and steel dry casks. They just sit there doing nothing for years and years and years. It's very safe and efficient. For reasons again, deeply connected with domestic, with local politics, there's tremendous opposition to dry cask storage in Japan. I'm not going to go into this in a huge amount of depth now, but I think there's at least two different things the central government could do to create more storage space for spent fuel. So that kind of summarizes my main findings and some of my recommendations. And I very much look forward to having a conversation and taking some questions about that. Thanks, James. I think you've really given us a lot to think about and I'm sure that in the discussion we'll get into some of these issues in your policy suggestions in greater detail. I wonder if I might start the questions by asking a little bit more about your research methodology. You mentioned at the outset that you traveled to Japan and spent some time and done some interviews and without naming names and so forth, given the need to protect some of your sources. I wonder what you learned from that experience of actually getting out and talking to people at the prefecture and the village level and some of the communities that have reactors, including reactors that might burn plutonium in the future. And how does that sort of reflect in your understanding of this problem and then also the challenges that confront both Japan as a national government and then the U.S. and other international partners and trying to formulate plans to deal with this? Sure. So in April of last year, I spent about two weeks traveling around Japan with a translator, which was invaluable. As Toby says, I'm not going to give lists of people I met with because almost all of the interviews were done off the record, but actually there were two governors I met with, the governor of Niigata prefecture, the governor of Shizuoka prefecture, both of those interviews were on the record, which is why I'm allowed to talk about them. And, you know, a large number of people from local authorities, from government, from industry, activists, researchers, journalists. And then again, with help, also kind of did a lot of documentary analysis. And, you know, there's actually a surprising amount out there in Japanese. I mean, all of the meetings of the Prime Minister's node as energy and environment committee that looked at the future of nuclear energy, we're all, you know, all the minutes are there. And I think going to places like how Mori prefecture interviewing there, going to places like Fukui prefecture that has a lot of reactors and spent fuel storage issues, I think helped give me a much more nuanced understanding of, I had a sense before this project started that the local politics of this was very, very important. And I think realistically we have to design a solution that meets local politics in Japan. We as Americans are very good at saying to other countries, we're just terrible domestic politics. You know, we just can't do X, Y and Z because of domestic politics. And actually it turns out that that's true in pretty much every country, I think. It's not just here. The domestic politics are different in every country. So, you know, to give you one example, I've talked a bit about how, why our Mori and Rokashou support reprocessing and the leverage that they've built up, very, very deliberately over time to force the central government into continually reprocessing. Spent fuel storage is another. As I've mentioned, one of the drivers reprocessing is spent fuel storage. You know, there's no way to put the spent fuel. And a lot of non-proliferation analysts including myself say, well, why not just build dry casks? Well, let me give you an example. Fukui prefecture, which is in western Japan, or rather kind of it's on the north coast of Japan, lots of Kansai Electric Power Company's reactors. All of those reactors are in the very isolated part of western Fukui. The much more populous part of eastern Fukui doesn't benefit from the electricity from those reactors. It's not in Kansai Electric Power Company's service area. So, when you talk to people in Fukui prefecture, what they say is we don't benefit from the electricity from these reactors. Why should we take the burden of managing the spent fuel? Why doesn't Osaka or Kyoto, why don't they manage the spent fuel since they're benefiting from the energy? Which is not an inherently unreasonable argument, frankly. So, again, one of the things, one of the recommendations that I have is that, and indeed I should emphasize, individual towns in Fukui have been willing to host dry cask storage areas. Mihama Town, for instance, which has three Kansai reactors, asked Kansai to conduct a site survey for hosting a dry cask storage facility in Mihama. So, they were willing to do it, but it got nixed by the prefecture. So, maybe the subsidy structure needs to be more focused on rewarding the prefecture, as well as the town or the village, for accepting dry cask storage. That distinction between the prefecture and the town and the village is one of the useful things that actually came out from going and talking to people on the ground. So, I'll open it up to questions from the floor. Please state your name and affiliation, and if your question or statement is not in the form of a question, I'll remind you in short order that it should be questions. There are microphones traveling around, so please start here in front, sir. Hang on just a second. Microphone coming. Thank you. How bad is the economic penalty for reprocessing and mocks, and either in terms of fraction of the price of electricity or since pennies per kilowatt hour or some unit like that? I have a good answer to that one. There was a report that came out earlier this year that said that based on data, I think it was from Mete, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, the utilities were spending mocks fuel cost the utilities nine times as much as it cost them uranium fuel. Now, fuel cost is only a relatively small fraction of the total cost of nuclear electricity, and the Japan Atomic Energy Commission during this 2012 process came out with a paper that compared the cost of the one through fuel cycle to the cost of reprocessing. Under all different assumptions of discount rates, what percentage of the spent fuel you reprocessed. At the top of my head, I simply can't remember what the answer was. It certainly came out with the conclusion, these are from official Japanese government figures, that reprocessing is more expensive than the one through fuel cycle. I just for the life of me cannot remember what the bottom line number was, but I can certainly send you the report. Hi, Russ Deming of SICE. Any prospect for regional cooperation, Japan ROK cooperation on rear-end fuel cycle issues? It's been talked about in the past. Unfortunately, no is my answer to that one. I think there would be tremendous geopolitical value to it, but the politics of moving spent fuel from one Japanese prefecture to another are really difficult. Our Mori prefecture requires all of these promises that if the plant doesn't open, the spent fuel goes back. I think the politics of shipping other people spent fuel into our Mori for reprocessing, if that's what you had in mind, I think it would make shipping fuel from Fukui to our Mori just like a piece of cake compared from shipping fuel from the ROK to Japan. I just can't see that happening from a Japanese perspective. I think from an ROK perspective, and I don't know, but my guess would be that there would be a lot of resistance to doing that because it would undermine the South Korean argument for pursuing their own pyro-processing program. So I have to say, as much as I think that regional reprocessing would, it's one of those fantastic ideas that, unfortunately, I think is just not doable. All the way in the back on this side here. I was wondering if you could speak a bit more about what the regional tensions would be. If I understand you correctly, we don't have to worry about Japan getting the bomb. What do we have to worry about, or what do other people worry about? You didn't talk enough about or at all about what South Korea and China think of this. If you could expand on that. The other thing is the one remarkable thing you said that everyone should probably write on their hand when they walk out of here is we need to renegotiate the deal. You're in a strange minority with people like me when you say that. Watch out. Sure, I mean China has repeatedly, there are a series of statements particularly around, I think it was around the security summit in 2014, where the Chinese were expressing concerns about Japan's separation of plutonium. Unquestionably, look, some of this is just finding a useful stick to beat the Japanese around the head with, which is something the Chinese enjoy quite a lot. But from my track two discussions with Chinese experts off the record, there is genuine concern in China that Japan is stockpiling plutonium to build a bomb. When I try to explain them why that's wrong, I just kind of like, as much as I've tried to explain all the domestic politics of this, and it's simply not believed. I think there is genuine concern in China about the reasons why Japan is stockpiling plutonium. There's some concern in South Korea, I think that's more manageable. The challenge I think with South Korea is about the, South Korea seeks to reprocess as well in the form of pyro processing. The two sides have agreed to reconsider the issue in 10 years, I think it is. And I think if Japan is producing plutonium, in my opinion from my research on the ROK, which is a few years old now, Japan's program was a significant driver for the ROK doing likewise. And especially if Japan is producing plutonium it can't use. I think that's a very bad precedent that could be followed by other states. In terms of the 123 agreement, Henry, all I'd say is I don't support renegotiating the agreement. I say let's keep the agreement in force and let's negotiate a separate politically binding side agreement on plutonium management. Again, all I say is you can characterize my proposal as you see fit. I do not think that a politically binding side agreement is the same as renegotiating the 123 agreement. I wonder if I might take Henry's question and ask it in a slightly different way about the regional piece of this, which is you mentioned the politics in Korea and sort of looking to Japan and the Japanese program being a driver for, or a model even for what Korea has done. But I wonder if you might also comment a little bit about the lessons of the Japanese experience for both Korea and China. China is contemplating a fairly significant entry into reprocessing and they may not believe the domestic politics argument about Japan now, but they could well in the future. Well, I think there are very important lessons to be drawn from this. And one of the things, I didn't discuss this in my remarks, but at the end of the report, one of the things that I discuss is the lessons that reprocessing in Japan has for elsewhere. Japan originally, one of the reasons Japan sought to reprocess originally was because of energy security. But actually the system that Japan has created, I argue, risks undermining its energy security. There is a real challenge facing Japan when it comes to spend fuel storage. You know, one of the reasons why the Japanese utilities argue they need reprocessing, and this is a serious reason these days, is because there's just not enough space for spent fuel. Imagine what happens if the NRA, the regulator, says that Rokasho can't be operated because it's not safe seismically. Or imagine if the retrofits are just not possible to do in a hot reprocessing plant. I don't think that's the most likely outcome, but a lot of people I've spoken to say that's not impossible. Well, if Japan can't operate Rokasho, the utilities say they're in real danger of not being able to operate reactors. When I look at Japan over the last few years, a lot of opponents of nuclear energy say Japan has managed fine without reactors. It's not my reading at all of the situation in Japan. From a climate change perspective, from a balance of payments perspective, from a cost of electricity perspective, Japan has really suffered from not having reactors operational. So Japan's system for managing spent fuel has become, you know, it's a system where if there is a serious shock to this system, such as the NRA saying that Rokasho can't operate or a very long delay, that could actually compromise the operation of Japan's reactors. And so, you know, my view about reprocessing is, look, anyone who knows me and knows my writing knows I'm no fan of reprocessing. But one of the things that I think states considering reprocessing should do is design their reprocessing programs if they're going to go down this route so that the costs of terminating the program are not intolerable. And one of the things associated with that is don't do reprocessing because you don't have enough space for spent fuel. Reprocessing is not an answer to a lack of space for spent fuel. You need to have spent fuel storage, even if you're going down the route of reprocessing. Similarly, don't build the reprocessing plant in the poorest, least economically vibrant area of your country because that massively exacerbates the problems of shutting it down. Build it somewhere where it's not a key local source of employment. And of course, governments are going to want to use a massive industrial plant as a key local source of employment. But I argue that is a short-term way of looking at this. So I think, you know, I know that many advocates of reprocessing won't disagree with me about whether it's a good thing or a bad thing. But I think there are important lessons about if you're going to go down this route, go down this route in a sensible way. The lady in the back. Thanks. Jessica Matthews from Carnegie. It seems as though you have an assumption here that the current domestic politics is immutable. And I wondered, it is also clearly rather bizarrely partial. And as Dave pointed out, I mean, it's sort of immune to huge economic disparities. Doesn't seem to take very much into account Japan's own strong feelings about nuclear weapons. If the government were really to take ownership of this problem, is current public opinion so unchangeable that you couldn't end up with something that's not so manifestly weird and incoherent as you've described it? And I mean, even your notion of five years between production and use, you run a whole lot of security risks in five years, right? So talk a bit about whether that couldn't change. Well, I think domestic politics is not necessarily immutable over the long term. And many of my suggestions are about how to make it mutable. So for instance, if I think the idea of an immediate end to reprocessing is just not feasible. If Japan wants to extricate itself from reprocessing, or as I argue, give itself the option not to reprocess in future. Give a future government the choice about whether to continue with this. You have to do things like have an alternative way of ensuring that our Mori and Rokasho's concerns about the spent fuel are met. Like there is a real problem. There's 3,000 of tons of spent fuel sitting in the prefecture. If there was an alternative interim storage site where you could move that, all of a sudden the challenge of convincing them to get rid of the plant would look that much easier. Similarly, if you can offer bigger subsidies to prefectures for accepting dry cask storage, maybe you make that easier. So my assumption is emphatically not over the long term that one can't change this. It is that the positions that local politicians have adopted, coupled to their ability to coerce the central government, make short-term change non-consensually impossible. Long-term consensual change in which you can actually address their concerns and provide a way of meeting their demands, that's the kind of change that many of the recommendations in the report hang for. And what is the possibility of huge cost overruns between now and completion? I don't have a good answer to that one. I mean, my understanding is that a construction on j-mox has started. I actually don't know what process j-mox uses, whether it uses the French mox process which is known to work or another mox process that hasn't yet been tested. I simply don't know the answer to the chemistry of the mox process. The NRA is also assessing the safety of the mox plant at the moment. And I believe that someone may correct me that the current targeted start date I think is October 2017. I could be wrong about that, but that's the current targeted start date. As I say, my assumption is that both the start date for Rokasho and for j-mox are both going to slip. I just don't have a good sense of whether they're likely to slip at the same rate, whether there's additional challenges that may be met in j-mox. I just don't know the details of that. There was another question just to Jessica's right there. Thank you. Ryan Schaefer with the Mansfield Foundation. Congratulations. I think it was a great report, very easy to understand articulate. Two quick questions. One is on your factors for determining the ability of plants to burn mox fuel in the future. I've been concerned that it shouldn't be an assumption, or excuse me, that there's no guarantee that local mayors and governors won't rescind the right or the agreement, pre-existing agreement to burn mox fuel as happened in Hamaoka. Did you factor in the possibility that that could be an important factor going forward as well? The other question is, I think a geopolitical one that might touch back on the China and Korea question, but if, as you argue, the Japanese government takes ownership of the problem and of the process, and presumably of JNFL, they also take ownership of the fissile materials which are currently privately owned. So is there a geopolitical nuance there that's important, or has the assumption all along been if you're going to worry about Japan and nuclear weapons, you don't care whether it's technically owned by the private sector or by the government? Such a fascinating question that second one. Let me take it first. I'm reminded slightly here of the Sankaku Islands. When was it two years ago, three years ago, the Japanese government nationalized the Sankaku Islands, which they tried to do as a way of placating domestic pressure without being provocative. Like it was genuinely not meant to be a provocative move by the Japanese government, but was seen as being very provocative by China. So I actually don't think ownership of the problem involves ownership of plutonium necessarily. It might do, but I don't think it has to. What I mean by ownership of the problem is really two things. Firstly, the Japanese government saying this is our problem, we're going to do what's necessary not to stockpile plutonium. We as the Japanese government will be willing to interfere with the operation of private industry to achieve that goal. And secondly, it has to have the legal ability to do that. Now, at the moment, Japan is not the US, and in practice I suspect that if the Japanese government said to JNFL, we need you to operate Rokasho more slowly, if that was in the US then the private industry would just go, no. Whereas in Japan, you would reach some kind of consensus behind the scenes over that one. Nonetheless, I still think there would be value to having a legal mechanism by which the government can ensure that the steps necessary to keep plutonium demand and supply and balance are taken. And as I say, I don't think that necessarily has to involve ownership of Japanese plutonium, and frankly I think there would be a risk if the Japanese government were to take ownership of that plutonium that that would be misinterpreted. In terms of your other question, I have to say I don't see any other reactor in which I think this is right, I might actually have to just double check. My concern is, I don't think there are many other reactors where I see evidence right now of mocks burning permission being withdrawn. That could happen if you have, say, a governor elected on an anti-nuclear populist stance. A governor might decide to kind of follow what happened in Shizuoka and withdraw permission for mocks, consent for mocks rather. But I don't see any signs of that happening. I think the bigger concern is the prefectures where mock permission to burn mocks was not given before the Fukushima, consent to burn mocks, I'm sorry, was not given before the Fukushima accident. So you have, I think it's, I could get this wrong off the top of my head, but you have Niagata prefecture where you have Kishiwazaki, the world's largest nuclear power plant, Kishiwazaki Karuya, where permission to burn mocks actually was given, I think in the 1990s and then withdrawn and there wasn't permission to burn mocks in place before Fukushima. I think it's going to be very, very hard to get permission there. There was permission was not given, I think, for Tokaidaini in Ibaraki prefecture, I think so, and permission wasn't given, I think it was Shikawan. Yes, so there are a number of reactors where permission to burn mocks was not given before Fukushima. I think getting that now is going to be very difficult. Please, over here. Just hang on for a second. Thanks, Ed Lyman, UCS. So Jessica Matthews raised the security issue and I was at Takahama this summer and there's fresh mocks fuel in the pool there and the apparent security is a joke. So you really didn't address that much in your report, but it seems that if there's going to be a side agreement that maybe there needs to be additional security provision rather than just relying on what's already in the 1-2-3 agreement that refers to the relevant NSERC 2-5 provision, so would you consider as part of that US pressing for additional security measures that might require armed responders at plants that are using mocks and like that? Sure. Let me address the security point. My position on security is as somebody who doesn't have either American or Japanese clearances, I don't know what the security arrangements in Japanese plants are. However, Prime Minister Abe and President Obama have said in a joint statement that plutonium accumulations anywhere in the world pose nuclear security risks. So the Prime Minister of Japan has acknowledged the nuclear security risks associated with plutonium and I think that's one of the reasons why no country should be stockpiling plutonium. What I would say is if the US government has concluded based on a lot more information than I could have that the Japanese security measures at Japanese plants could be improved, then I would certainly say that I think this side agreement could be one way of getting the political buy-in to achieve that. I think that that issue, though, need not necessarily even wait for a formal side agreement. I think that's something that could potentially be pursued further bilaterally. But as I say, the reason I didn't discuss the specific security measures in Japanese plants is because I just don't know what they are. So I think I just relied on Prime Minister Abe's acknowledgement that all plutonium accumulations carry security risks with them. So, Jungmin. Jungmin Kang from Nuclear Program of NRDC. Thanks, James, for your excellent talks. I'd like to add one technical comment. There are still influential Japanese nuclear experts who say that their plutonium is a reactor-grade plutonium separated from commercial-spent fuel with a large burn-up. So it cannot be, or at least, it's harder to be used for nuclear weapons. So they are intentionally making Japanese government people and public misunderstanding on the risk of separated plutonium. So as you know, any kind of plutonium is a good material for nuclear weapons purpose, so their argument should be corrected. I think on this issue about whether you can use reactor-grade plutonium to build bombs, all I would say is that under the International Atomic Energy Agency definitions, all plutonium, with one tiny exception, is considered to be direct-use weapons usable material. The only exception being if it's more than 80% plutonium 238. But the definition under which the International Atomic Energy Agency works is that all plutonium is weapons usable. And indeed, that also includes plutonium that's fabricated into mox fuel before it's irradiated in a nuclear reactor is also included in that category. So given that that's the definition that's used for safeguards, my belief is that we should use that, you know, that's the definition that we should use at other times as well. So I think, Jungman's question, is there some misleading of the Japanese public on this question, or is it just sort of a technical facade given around the program? Well, I mean, look, there is, it's a bit like the security issue. I very deliberately don't like weighing into this debate about can reactor-grade plutonium be used in weapons, right? I've read the articles on the subject, I've read the Carson Mark article in Science and Global Security, I've read the rebuttals to that. One can argue this way or that way about the technicalities of using reactor-grade plutonium. My point is it actually doesn't matter whether, like, you know, the IEA definition, which is that reactor-grade plutonium can be used, like, is count as weapons-usable plutonium. And it seems to me that that's what really matters is the IEA definition. And I, you know, I, again, like, I've never actually built a nuclear weapon, so I'm kind of reluctant to... We'll plan to keep it that way. Please, Jeffrey. Jeff Smith at the Center for Public Integrity. On the security issue, we published four stories about this last year, so I would recommend anyone who wanted to learn more about the security issues at Rikasho to take a look at those. James, what I want to ask you about is the... You've talked a lot about the need for the Japanese government to look at things differently. What about, I'd like to ask you about the need for the United States government to look at things differently. My impression is that while privately U.S. officials are intensely frustrated that Rikasho is proceeding and will sometimes say that they prefer that no plutonium, that the plutonium stockpile in Japan not grow larger, officially U.S. government policy, Obama administration policy, is to be agnostic. And so I'm wondering whether these very interesting recommendations have been discussed by you with administration officials and what kind of response or reaction you got. It would require a more active role in Washington, not just in Tokyo. The federal government here would have to seize the problem in ways that it has not yet, to my knowledge, seized it. So could you talk about that a little bit, please? Sure. I think I would slightly disagree with your characterization of where the U.S. government is at the moment. I mean, I think the U.S. government is not publicly agnostic on the issue of Japan stockpiling plutonium. I think there are very clear statements of U.S. government policy that Japan has made a commitment not to stockpile plutonium and the U.S. expects Japan to live up to that commitment. Where I would agree with you is publicly the U.S. government I think has not said very much about exactly how Rokasho should be operated and hasn't intervened in that yet. In terms of, and to be fair, the Obama administration has a real timing issue here, which is there will be a presidential election in November next year. And there will be a new president in January next year, the year after that. And unless you can complete the whole of the one, two, three decision process before this, while this administration is in place, there's frankly not much point starting it, especially from a Japanese perspective. I mean, if I were a Japanese policymaker and I would be like, well, we could talk ourselves with the Obama administration, but then everything could change on a dime in January. No, I don't think anything, I don't think stuff necessarily will change on a dime in January 20, 17, 18, no, 17, because I think actually whoever the next president is, it is very likely that they will be concerned about Japan not stockpiling plutonium. I mean, that has been a, since the Carter administration, there's been a consistent US policy against stockpiling plutonium, and I don't think that a future administration is likely to decide actually it's fine for Japan to stockpile plutonium. But I do accept that from a Japanese perspective, there may not be a huge amount of desire to discuss this with an administration that's going to be out of office in the not too distant future. So, you know, that is inevitably something I think the Obama administration has to consider as it thinks through these issues. You know, I'm not going to publicly discuss, you know, if I do meet with officials, what gets discussed on those occasions. But I would say that I think your, I think US officials have given public indications that they are concerned about the possibility of plutonium stockpiling. So, I've got two questions here, let's take them together. So, first, yep. My name is Dennis Nelson, and I'd like to ask you about this reprocessing of Mark's fuel, irradiated Mark's fuel. You said that Japan was going to build a second reprocessing plant to do that. It seems to me that that would create a perpetual increase in plutonium, because Mark's fuel is a very small percentage plutonium. So, most of it's uranium, so you just produce more plutonium and then reprocess them, so it would cause a perpetual increase. And then my question is, doesn't Japan already have a reprocessing plant at Tokimura? I remember something about a criticality accident there, 10 or 15 years ago, where a number of workers were exposed to a solution that went critical and produced neutrons. So, what's happened to that plant? Bob, please. Bob Einhorn Brookings. James, you suggested that if Rokasha didn't restart, Japanese reactors might have to shut down. I assume what you meant is that Rokasha wouldn't take any more spend fuel, the reactor operators wouldn't have any place to put it, they'd run out of, you know, and so forth, and they'd have to shut the reactor. Is that what you meant? How likely do you think that scenario is to play out? Do you think the reactor operators are, and Rokasha is exaggerating that concern? Let me just mention something about Henry's point. I don't think Henry was accusing you of wanting to renegotiate the 1-2-3. I think what you seem to suggest is use the leverage of a possible threat to renegotiate it to get the Japanese to agree to the kind of side agreement that you're talking about. So I think you would be using the threat of renegotiation to get this side deal. Isn't that right? Sure. Let me deal with all of those points. On Tokaimura, yes, that was a pilot scale reprocessing plant. Some of the Japanese plutonium was indeed separated at Tokaimura. There was an announcement, I think it was earlier this year, that they were now going to decommission that plant. So my understanding is that hasn't separated plutonium in a while. The endless cycle of plutonium actually was originally the reason why Japan got down, started the reprocessing. The original vision for the plutonium economy was the extraction of plutonium from reactors that would then be used to fuel fast breeder reactors that could produce more plutonium. And you would have an effectively endless cycle. That's a pro-reflation problem. Well, I mean, that's one of the reasons that I don't support fast breeder cycle. There's also the practical issue, which is that Japan's plans to commercialize breeder reactors have gone slipped a long way behind schedule. Tatsu Suzuki, who's a former vice chairman of the Japan Atomic Energy Commission, has written that in 50 years Japan's plans to commercialize breeder reactors have slipped by 80 years. And as they have many countries around the world, right? I mean, this is not like the US gave up on them because they were having the same problems. In terms of Bob's questions, yes, I mean, it's certainly the case that there is an implicit threat to renegotiate the one, two, three agreement. I very much doubt it will come to that. I think that a politically binding side agreement is something that meets both sides' needs and something that both sides can live with. And in terms of reactor closures, yeah, that's exactly right. What I'm saying is that at the moment, basically, because when Japan was starting its nuclear energy program, it was using the US as a model. And this was in the 60s when the US planned to reprocess. So when you take fuel from a reactor, you have to put it in pools. And in Japan, those pools were built with very limited space because of the assumption that fuel would be reprocessed. And when those pools fill up, which incidentally we're now seeing at a time when these reactors are very interestingly, when those pools fill up, you literally can't operate the reactor because there's literally nowhere to put the spend fuel. So one of the concerns that the utilities in Japan have said is that if you don't operate rocacho, or rather the current plan is that as the pools by reactors fill up, you move the fuel to rocacho and you create more space. But if you're not operating rocacho and the pool at rocacho fills up, then there's just nowhere for the spent fuel to go. And I think this is a serious problem at some reactors. I mean, you can look at the capacity factors are made publicly available. Yuraki Sekiguchi's very good piece has an English translation of all of the, not capacity factors, all of the factors by which the pools are filled. And in many of the older reactors, there is a, you know, some of these pools are like 70, 80% full. So the threat is not tomorrow, but over the course of five years, say, there could be a real problem there. Since we're on the subject, I actually think one of the short term solution to this problem lies somewhere called Mutsu. In our Mori prefecture, there is a dry cast storage facility that is basically ready to accept fuel. It's not a huge facility, but it's not a tiny one. That facility is owned by two utilities, TEPCO and the Japan Atomic Power Company, who ironically are the two utilities who are least likely to produce spent fuel in the near future. So one thing you could do is those utilities could sell space at Mutsu to other utilities that are in more urgent need of it. Now again, Mutsu is, somebody will correct me on this, is either three or five thousand tons the first phase of Mutsu. So it's kind of a medium sized dry cast storage facility, but I think that provides a short term option. But yeah, I mean, I actually think in some reactors, it's not, you know, it's not impossible that if nothing is done about this problem, the reactors could have to shut down. Further on the one, two, three point in your trips to Japan to research this project, did you gather that there was any concern amongst Japanese officials or experts that the US would want to renegotiate? Or is there just a sense that the agreement is fine and it'll be splayed over? One of the hard things about being a US ally is how unpredictable US politics is. And from my experience, when a one, two, three agreement is due to come up, every country in the world is always worried about what the US position is going to be. So I was frequently asked in Japan about what the US position on the one, two, three agreement would be, but I think that's in no way unique to Japan. That's a fair point. Question back there. Dan Fenster-Macher state, you made a number of very compelling arguments about the domestic politics, this kind of intractable web that's affected the decisions in Japan. How closely from your research and your interviews do you think the Japanese government is looking at the US program, the US mocks program to get rid of excess defense plutonium? And if there were to be a change in that due to cost or other reasons, do you think this would affect them? If so, how in the short term or maybe even in the longer term? I think it's, I'm thinking about it. I think it's fair to say the US mocks program never once came up in my discussions in Japan. Sometimes people not unreasonably pointed out that, you know, my, my, neither my original home nor my adoptive home have any policy for managing their large quantities of plutonium, which is, which is true. But the specifics of the mocks program I think were not ever discussed once in my meeting, sorry, the US mocks program I think were never discussed once specifically in any of my meetings in Japan. Certainly, you know, outside of Tokyo in the prefectures, you know, local politicians are local politicians everywhere in the world, they're concerned about their local area, what the US does or doesn't do. And I didn't, I have to say, I struggled to think of any times when officials in Tokyo ever kind of talked about the mocks, the US mocks program. So, I think we've had a pretty thorough examination of this issue. For those of you who have US government badges in your pockets, perhaps you'll take some notes and consideration for the transition memos when the next government comes in, whether to renegotiate or not. Thank you for your attention today and please join me in thanking James for his good work on this subject.