本期主題
作者：Miles A. Pomper
On March 11, when the first foreshock struck, my colleague Jeffrey Lewis and I were having lunch with senior industry officials at Japan's controversial Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant. That facility both 1)enriches 2)uranium and reprocesses 3)spent nuclear fuel to 4)extract 5)plutonium, two processes that can also be used to make nuclear weapons. We were in the country to tour its nuclear facilities—an arrangement designed to show how far Japan was prepared to go to convince the international community that its facilities were only for peaceful purposes.
Few countries in the world—and no other non-nuclear-weapon state—are as invested in nuclear power as Japan. It is already the world's third largest nuclear energy producer (after the United States and France) with ambitious plans for providing half of its electricity from nuclear power. Japan is also a major nuclear power plant exporter, with 6)Toshiba and 7)Hitachi having some time ago 8)wrested control of the nuclear divisions of 9)Westinghouse and 10)General Electric.
Japan's 11)ardent pursuit of nuclear energy has sprung from a deep sense of vulnerability. Lacking coal, oil, natural gas, or other fossil fuels, Japan, particularly after the oil crises of the 1970s, has seen nuclear power as a means of providing energy security. And it has built a new generation of 12)centrifuges for uranium enrichment in a bid to ensure that it is not vulnerable to a cutoff in supply of nuclear fuel, even if its main providers—countries like France and the Netherlands—seem pretty 13)trustworthy.
Yet, Japan's efforts to ensure its energy security have created other kinds of insecurity. The loss-of-14)coolant accidents affecting the Fukushima nuclear reactors are far from the first nuclear accidents in Japan, where disturbing 15)seismic conditions and technical and communications 16)lapses have often seemed to 17)go hand in hand. For example, only four years ago, a 6.8 magnitude earthquake set off a fire at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactor in northwestern Japan that lasted for two hours and led to a radioactive water leak. The plant was subsequently shut for 21 months. In 2003, 17 nuclear plants were shut down temporarily following a scandal over 18)falsified safety inspection reports. In 1978, one of the plants damaged in a tsunami had a 19)nuclear chain reaction continue for seven hours after all such reactions were supposed to stop; the control 20)rods—meant to halt the reactions—had slipped out of position.