März 2011

Japan's Nuclear Crisis: A Wakeup Call for the World

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).

Posted March 14, 2011.

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