S. Kondo
Japan Atomic Energy Commission, Tokyo, Japan
Thank you very much Mr. Chairman for your kind introduction. Distin-guished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to have the chance to address you here in Kyoto at this “International Conference on Fast Reactors and Related Fuel Cycles (FR09)”. At the outset, I would like to thank the IAEA for organizing this conference and, taking this opportunity, I would like to assure its new Director General, Y. Amano, of Japan’s continuing support for the IAEA. I am looking forward to continuing to work with the IAEA in order to extend the benefits of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and science and technology to a global population.
We are witnessing today a global emergence of interest in the construction of nuclear power plants. There are a number of reasons for this. Major factors are the urgent and ever growing need for energy, particularly in the developing world, fluctuations in fossil fuel prices, the pursuit of security of energy supply and the growing recognition of the need to combat global warming.
Despite the global economic crisis, the IAEA’s latest projections continue to show a significant increase in nuclear generating capacity in the medium term.
The low projection for 2030 is now 511 GW(e) of generating capacity, compared with 370 GW(e) today. The high projection is 807 GW(e); more than a doubling of present levels.
Most of the 30 countries that already use nuclear power plan to expand their output. Growth targets have been raised significantly in China, India and the Russian Federation. In addition, according to the IAEA, some 50 countries — mostly in the developing world — have informed the IAEA that they might be interested in launching nuclear power programmes and 12 of these are actively considering nuclear power.
Even in the high case projection, however, nuclear power’s share of global power generation will go down from the current 16% level to 14% by 2030 and then rise to 22% by 2050, according to the projection published by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency in 20081. In other words, the growth of nuclear power in
1 OECD Nuclear Energy Agency: Nuclear Energy Outlook — 2008.
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the global power sector will not be able to keep pace with the growth in global electricity demand, at least in the medium term.
Then what should the global nuclear community do before ‘dawn’, preparing for the day when nuclear energy will play the leading role in global energy supply. My answer is, let us promote carefully planned yet highly aggressive actions across three different time frames: short term, medium term and long term.
The major short term action should be to continue to operate existing reactors safely and reliably, maintaining the public’s trust in both plant operators’
safety management and the government’s regulatory activities for safety and security.
In the case of Japan, urgent action in this category is to complete the re-evaluation of the seismic safety of every nuclear facility in Japan, taking into consideration lessons learned from the July 2007 seismic event at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant on the propagation of the seismic wave generated in a nearby fault, in which the seismic input to the plant significantly exceeded the level of the design basis seismic input. It is to be hoped that this review for the prototype Monju fast breeder reactor will be completed very soon.
The major medium term actions in the case of Japan are to add new generating capacity steadily, to operate the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant steadily and to construct intermediate spent fuel storage facilities in a timely manner, to provide assistance to countries that are considering introducing nuclear power to build the necessary infrastructure and to train a young generation of nuclear scientists and engineers who are to sustain the development and utilization of nuclear energy in the future.
One of the major long term actions should be to promote research and development programmes that exploit nuclear energy’s innate feature, namely, its economically harvestable resource base, which is good for a millennium, by closing the nuclear fuel cycles using fast neutron reactors.
You have gathered here in Kyoto to discuss the challenges and opportu-nities of this programme. I am sure that this city is one of the best places in the world for having discussions about such long term issues, since Kyoto had been the capital of Japan for more than a thousand years and it has a rich and unique cultural approach to long term prosperity.
In the previous century, there were several active fast breeder reactor R&D programmes being pursued worldwide. However, commercial development of fast reactors was put on hold in the 1980s and 1990s for several reasons, but primarily because they were projected as being uncompetitive.
At the start of this century, however, recognizing that the environmental benefits of nuclear energy could even extend to other energy products besides electricity by the latter part of this century, not a few countries have started to
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55 consider it wise to promote, as a long term action, a significant R&D effort on fast reactors and closed nuclear fuel cycles that meet the technology goals in sustain-ability, economics, safety and relisustain-ability, proliferation resistance and physical protection that will help nuclear energy play an essential worldwide role in the future.
In the case of Japan, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) is promoting the R&D of fast reactors and fuel cycle technology that can make it competitive and sustainable with regard to the energy supply market beyond 2050. Japan’s current programme goals are to produce, by 2015, a conceptual design for a fast reactor and its fuel cycle system that can satisfy the performance goals with regard to safety, economy, sustainability and proliferation resistance, and to start the operation of its demonstration system by around 2030.
Currently, the JAEA is exploring candidate technologies for a sodium cooled fast reactor that loads mixed oxide (MOX) containing minor actinides as constituents. Specifically, it is exploring advanced reprocessing technology that can efficiently recover minor actinides as well as plutonium from spent fuel and developing advanced technology to fabricate such fuel so as to make the fast reactor and its fuel cycle system a very unattractive route for diversion of weapons-usable material.
Furthermore, it has been claimed that selective separation of the various long lived actinides from spent fuel in the reprocessing process would allow their fabrication into fuel or targets to be irradiated in specifically adapted fast reactors or in accelerator driven systems where they would be transmuted into shorter lived elements while contributing to energy production, thereby leading to a reduction in the volume and radiotoxicity of the waste to be disposed of.
The set of technology goals deliberated at the outset of the project has been quite effective in stimulating the search for innovative technology candidates.
When we decide a system design is to be taken for further development, it becomes necessary to convert these candidates into a set of decision criteria. As there is a gap between available and required knowledge, to do so involves project risks.
Fast reactors will allow the recycling of used MOX fuel that is not practicable in light water reactors. This is an intrinsic advantage of fast reactors and from the sustainability viewpoint this will make it possible to allow the whole amount of high level waste to be disposed of in the usual form of glass canisters and with similar hear generation characteristics.
The criteria of economic competitiveness comes from the requirement of the market place and it is imperative therefore that the life cycle and power generation costs and financial risk of the system proposed should be at least comparable with those predicted for the light water reactors over the 2050 time frame and based on a specific risk assessment.
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As for safety, we have regulatory requirements such as safety goals and even quantitative safety objectives in terms of core melt frequency for light water reactors in some countries. Therefore, they should be used as references for considering the acceptance of the system proposed, though the differences between the core melt phenomena in light water reactors and those in sodium cooled fast reactors and their impact upon the applicability of these requirements should be clarified beforehand.
If not currently an issue, it will become one of the major risk elements for the project in the future. As for nuclear security, a procedure has already been established in many countries, in compliance with the IAEA’s INFCIRC 225 (i.e.
IAEA Guidelines on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material and Nuclear Facilities), to define a design basis threat that outlines the set of adverse charac-teristics for which the facility operators and state organizations together have protection responsibility and accountability.
Unlike the safety area, however, the nuclear community continues to be pressured into increasing security. Obviously, this is because quantitative security risk analysis is still at an early stage and the quantitative security objectives have not yet been established in society. I hope that a more balanced view on this issue will prevail in the near future.
The situation is far vaguer for non-proliferation goals. The obligation under the NPT for its State Party is to put any nuclear facility under IAEA safeguards. In September 2009, the United Nations Security Council resolved to encourage efforts to ensure development of peaceful uses of nuclear energy in a framework that reduces proliferation risk, adhering to the highest international standards for safeguards.
Why is a framework mentioned in this resolution? Presumably it is in recognition that the proliferation concerns should come not from the facilities themselves but from the possible actions to be taken by a country.
One can identify this recognition clearly in a speech given by the former IAEA Director General, M. ElBaradei, made at an IAEA conference in Beijing in 2009. According to him, countries that have mastered uranium enrichment and plutonium separation, much more than those that have mastered sophisticated nuclear fuel cycle technology, such as that required to handle highly radioactive and ‘hot’ materials such as minor actinide-bearing liquid, can be viewed as nuclear weapon capable States, meaning they could develop nuclear weapons within a short time span if they left the NPT or launched clandestine programmes2. He claims that the NPT gives too narrow a margin of
non-2 One school of thought claims that the probability of failure to make nuclear weapons covertly and overtly after leaving the NPT should be made sufficiently high by eliminating any kind of nuclear fuel cycle facilities, so as to give the United Nations Security Council ample time to consider any intervention.
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57 proliferation and therefore a multinational approach to the entire fuel cycle, including the back end, has great potential to facilitate the expanded safe and secure use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes, while reducing the risk of proliferation.
It should also be mentioned that a series of recent G8 summits has asked the Nuclear Suppliers Group to establish guidelines to restrict the transfer of reproc-essing technology, which is an essential element for the utilization of fast reactors.
Considering these developments, the global fast reactor R&D community should ask themselves, from the viewpoint of project risk management, whether they should pursue the development of fast reactor systems that fit into a global society with a large scale regional fuel cycle centre under multilateral control.
There is a proposal that this centre will provide a cradle to grave service to operators of fast reactors, supplying fresh fuel that contains fissile plutonium just in time for loading to the reactors and immediately taking back the used fuel when it is removed from the reactors. In such cases, it might be unnecessary to recycle minor actinides as it can be claimed that to do so has no particular advantage in terms of safety of high level waste disposal and minor actinide-bearing fuels feature a potentially considerable increase in gamma and neutron dose and of decay heat, which would require specific protection and cooling methods for transporting these fuels.
As safeguards represent a cog in the wheel of the non-proliferation policy, we run the risk of obtaining an insufficient answer to the request to develop a civil nuclear energy framework if we concentrate our attention only on the means of strengthening the proliferation resistance of the technological systems concerned.
In conclusion, ladies and gentlemen, many countries are committed to making a long term investment in the development of the fourth generation nuclear reactor systems and fast reactors and its fuel cycle, in particular with entrepreneurial imagination and willingness. The key to this endeavour will be to create and deploy new products and processes or new systems that currently do not exist. The energy technologies that catalyse such development will reap the greatest rewards.
Product innovation is, however, not so easy to achieve successfully.
Innovative learning is necessary to be successful in this endeavour. I have touched upon an aspect of risk management in this innovation process for a fast reactor and its fuel cycle technology, as I believe risk management is an opera-tionalization of innovative learning.
I found in the programme for this week, many sessions for discussion of innovative learning in various contexts and areas with a view to pursuing the innovation of the fast reactor and its fuel cycle technology. I sincerely wish you every success with the conference. Thank you for your attention.
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