Radiation in parts of the Marshall Islands is far higher than Chernobyl, study says via Los Angeles Times

Posted on 2019/07/16 by yukimiyamotodepaul

By SUSANNE RUST
JUL 15, 2019 | 12:00 PM 

Think of the most radioactive landscapes on the planet and the names Chernobyl and Fukushima may come to mind.

Yet research published Monday suggests that parts of the Marshall Islands in the central Pacific, where the United States conducted 67 nuclear tests during the Cold War, should be added to the list.

In a peer-reviewed study, Columbia University researchers report that soil on four isles of the Marshall Islands contains concentrations of nuclear isotopes that greatly exceed those found near the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear power plants. On one isle, those levels are reported to be 1,000 times higher.

[…]

Researchers found concentrations of plutonium-238 on Naen, raising the possibility that the island was used as an unreported dumping ground. Plutonium-238 is a radioisotope associated with nuclear waste and not generally with fallout, said Ivana Nikolic Hughes, a co-author of the research and an associate professor of chemistry at Columbia.

The only other place the team detected this isotope was at Runit, where the United States entombed nuclear waste from bomb testing under a leaking concrete dome.

“We can’t say for sure that [dumping on Naen] is what happened,” said Nikolic Hughes, who directs Columbia’s K=1 Project — a multidisciplinary program dedicated to educating the public about nuclear technology. “But people should not be living on Rongelap until this is addressed.”

[…]

Some researchers have declared Rongelap safe for re-habitation. But the Columbia study suggests that, for now, people not return to Rongelap or Bikini atolls, where Naen and Bikini are located, until certain areas have been more thoroughly cleaned. More than 600 people have already returned to parts of Enewetak atoll — where Runit and Enjebi are located.

“We are concerned about what is being consumed on Naen and at what level,” said James Matayoshi, the mayor of Rongelap Atoll. He said he didn’t like the idea of people collecting food from Naen and the islands near it, because he doesn’t know what kind of risk that poses for his constituents’ health.

[…]

For years the U.S. government, with technological help from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, has worked to reduce radiation on Rongelap Island — removing soil from around the village and applying potassium to areas where food is grown, which works to prevent plants from taking up radiation.

People can be exposed to radiation by inhaling dust or drinking contaminated water, but studies have found that food is the primary way Marshall Islanders are exposed to radiation — even if background and soil radiation are relatively low.

In 1992, the United States and the Republic of the Marshall Islands entered into a memorandum of understanding that stipulated Rongelap Atoll, which was evacuated in 1954 and again in 1985, could only be resettled when radiation exposure levels — all sources of exposure — fell below 100 millirem per year. That standard, noted Nikolic Hughes, is much less stringent than standards in the United States — where the EPA established a limit of 15 millirem per year for the general population living near the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, for the first 10,000 years.

[…]

The comparisons in the studies being released Monday — including findings that plutonium levels in parts of the Marshall Islands are 15 to 1,000 times higher to those sampled near the Chernobyl and Fukushima power plants — are sure to raise eyebrows.

But the study’s authors note there’s one big difference between the Marshall Islands and other high-profile contaminated sites. At Chernobyl and Fukushima, there are active government efforts to keep people away from the contaminated reactors, whereas islands such as Bikini and Naen are easily accessible by the Marshallese, who traditionally have boated from island to island to collect fruits and other food.

“The Marshallese people deserve an independent assessment from experts on the safety of their islands, starting from collecting raw data all the way to the final analysis and conclusions,” said Hughes, lamenting that even his work could be seen as suspect by Marshall Islanders.
“It would be ideal,” he said, “if there were no U.S. citizens doing this independent study.”

Reporting for this article was funded in part by the Investigative Reporting Resource at the Columbia Journalism School. 

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原発避難、今も苦しむ　シンポで当事者ら訴え　福島 via 河北新報

Posted on 2019/07/16 by yukimiyamotodepaul

東京電力福島第１原発事故の被災地の現状を報告する「福島を忘れない！　全国シンポジウム」が１３日、福島市であった。避難を強いられた福島県内の被災市町村の議員や集団訴訟の原告らが、脱原発を訴えるなどした。

県内外から約１２０人が参加。福島県南相馬市小高区から横浜市へ避難した福島原発かながわ訴訟原告団の村田弘団長（７６）は「関連死や健康被害を訴える人がたくさんいる。原発事故はまだ終わっていないということを発信し続けなければならない」と呼び掛けた。

川内、浪江、葛尾、飯舘４町村の議員も登壇し、避難指示解除後の帰還状況などを説明。

（略）

元京都大原子炉実験所助教の小出裕章氏による講演もあった。シンポは今年で７回目。

全文は原発避難、今も苦しむ　シンポで当事者ら訴え　福島

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福島原発事故、今ある事実を「土ほこり」に知るvia 京都反原発めだかの学校・学習会

Posted on 2019/07/15 by nfield

〜福島から関東、聖火も通る国道沿いの放射能を測り続けて〜

もっと読む。

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東京）原発避難、原発労働…市民団体ら研究発表　杉並 via 朝日新聞

Posted on 2019/07/15 by nfield

反原発運動の理論的指導者といわれた故高木仁三郎さんの遺志で設立された「高木基金」（代表理事・河合弘之弁護士）の昨年度助成を受けた団体や個人２０件の研究成果発表会が１３、１４の両日、東京都杉並区の明治大学で行われた。

　基金は科学的な考察に裏づけられた批判ができる「市民科学者」の育成・支援を目的に助成している。[…] 、住民説明会も「避難計画への不満を共感しあうだけの場になっている」と報告した。

また、「被ばく労働を考えるネットワーク」は稲葉奈々子教授らとフランスなど海外の原発労働者の状況を調査。「複数の国の原発で働く労働者の合計被曝（ひばく）線量が管理されていない」などと問題点を指摘した。

　「新外交イニシアティブ」は日米原子力協定に関し、米国側の動向の調査を行った。代表の猿田佐世弁護士は「米国では原発は斜陽産業で経済的にペイしないと思われている」とし、「米国では原発推進派でも安全保障上の観点から日本の再処理反対の人が多い」と報告した。

別ウインドウで開きます

　報告は近く高木基金のホームページ（http://www.takagifund.org/）で公開する予定。（青木美希）

全文

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The Hoax Nuclear Power Is Green via Enviro Video 1

Posted on 2019/07/15 by nfield
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Trinity: “The most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project” via Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Posted on 2019/07/15 by nfield

By Kathleen M. Tucker, Robert Alvarez

For the past several years, the controversy over radioactive fallout from the world’s first atomic bomb explosion in Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945—code-named Trinity—has intensified. Evidence collected by the New Mexico health department but ignored for some 70 years shows an unusually high rate of infant mortality in New Mexico counties downwind from the explosion and raises a serious question whether or not the first victims of the first atomic explosion might have been American children. Even though the first scientifically credible warnings about the hazards of radioactive fallout from a nuclear explosion had been made by 1940, historical records indicate a fallout team was not established until less than a month before the Trinity test, a hasty effort motivated primarily by concern over legal liability.

In October 1947, a local health care provider raised an alarm about infant deaths downwind of the Trinity test, bringing it to the attention of radiation safety experts working for the US nuclear weapons program. Their response misrepresented New Mexico’s then-unpublished data on health effects. Federal and New Mexico data indicate that between 1940 and 1960, infant death rates in the area downwind of the test site steadily declined—except for 1945, when the rate sharply increased, especially in the three months following the Trinity blast. The 21 kiloton explosion occurred on a tower 100 feet from the ground and has been likened to a “dirty bomb” that cast large amounts of heavily contaminated soil and debris—containing 80 percent of the bomb’s plutonium—over thousands of square-miles. (See Figure 1.)

After a nearly half a century of denial, the US Department of Energy concluded in 2006, “the Trinity test also posed the most significant hazard of the entire Manhattan Project.”[1] Four years later the US Centers for Disease Control gave weight to this assessment by concluding:

“New Mexico residents were neither warned before the 1945 Trinity blast, informed of health hazards afterward, nor evacuated before, during, or after the test. Exposure rates in public areas from the world’s first nuclear explosion were measured at levels 10,000- times higher than currently allowed.”[2]

Meanwhile the National Cancer Institute is conducting a study to model the dispersion and dose reconstruction for people who may have been exposed to fallout from the Trinity explosion. Regardless of the outcome of this study, it is clear the public was put in harm’s way because of US government negligence in conducting and its participation in a coverup of the results of an exceedingly dangerous experiment.

[…]

Finding the facts. More than 70 years later, we examined the vital statistics collected by the US government and the state of New Mexico in the 1940s to determine if area health patterns changed after the first atomic explosion. The data eventually provided to Los Alamos and Bryan in January 1948 indicated a sharp rise in infant deaths following the Trinity explosion. Later, between 1940 and 1960, infant mortality in New Mexico showed steady and deep annual declines—except for 1945, when it shot up.[8] The infant mortality rate in New Mexico in 1945 was 100.8 per 1,000 live births; the rate for 1944 was 89.1, and for 1946 it was 78.2.[9] (See Figure 2.) The unpublished data sent to Los Alamos indicated an infant death rate nearly 34 percent higher in 1945 than subsequently made public.

[…]

Fallout protection was not a priority for the Trinity explosion. The Trinity test was top secret to all but a few scientists and military officials. No warnings were issued to citizens about off- site fallout dangers, although off-site measurements done with a paucity of instruments and people indicated that radiation spread well beyond the test site boundaries.  [16]

The Trinity bomb was detonated atop a 100-foot steel tower. With an estimated explosive yield of 21,000 tons of TNT, the fireball vaporized the tower and shot hundreds of tons of irradiated soil to a height of 50,000 to 70,000 feet, spreading radioactive fallout over a very large area. Fallout measurements taken shortly after the explosion were very limited and primitive instruments were used; the data suggest no measurements regarding inhalation or ingestion of radionuclides were taken.

Joseph Shonka, a principal researcher for the study of the Trinity shot for the Centers for Disease Control, recently concluded that the Trinity fallout “was similar to what might occur with a dirty bomb. A fraction of the plutonium [~20%] was used in the explosion [and] … the fireball contacted the soil. Because of the low altitude, fallout exhibited a ‘skip distance’ with little fallout near the test site. Although there were plans for evacuation, radio communication was lost as the survey teams traveled out to follow the overhead plume. Thus, the command center was unsure of whether that the criteria had been met … and failed to order the evacuation.”[17]

Scientists had stressed the importance of protection from radioactive fallout following a nuclear weapon explosion, five years before the Trinity test. “Owing to the spread of radioactive substances with the wind, the bomb could probably not be used without killing large numbers of civilians, and this may make it unsuitable as a weapon for use by this country,” warned Manhattan Project physicists Otto Frisch and Rudolf Peierls in their important memorandum of March 1940, which accelerated production of the first atomic weapons. “[I]t would be very important to have an organization which determines the exact extent of the danger area, by means of ionization measurements, so that people can be warned from entering it.”[18]

[…]

We should remember that compensation for people near the Nevada test site was not exclusively based on abstract modeling of radiation doses. Rather, downwinders were also compensated because the burden of proof fell unfairly on them. They were victims not just of willful negligence, but also the government’s purposeful deception and suppression of evidence about the high-hazard activity that the US nuclear weapons program constituted. The current body of historical evidence of harm, negligence, and deception—especially the evidence of increased infant death following the first nuclear explosion—should be more than enough for long overdue justice for the people in New Mexico who were downwind of Trinity.

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Recycle everything, America—except your nuclear waste via Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Posted on 2019/07/15 by nfield

By Allison Macfarlane, Sharon Squassoni

[…]

Now that Americans are “woke” about waste in general, they may turn to the specific kind produced by the nuclear energy industry. Plans to revitalize US nuclear power, which is in dire economic straits, depend on the potential for new, “advanced” reactors to reduce and recycle the waste they produce.  Unfortunately, as they “burn” some kinds of nuclear wastes, these plants will create other kinds that also require disposal. At the same time, these “advanced” reactors—many of which are actually reprises of past efforts—increase security and nuclear weapons proliferation risks and ultimately do nothing to break down the political and societal resistance to finding real solutions to nuclear waste disposal.

The current nuclear dream is really no different from previous ones of the last 70 years: the next generation of reactors, nuclear power advocates insist, will be safer, cheaper, more reliable, less prone to produce nuclear bomb-making material, and more versatile (producing electricity, heat, and perhaps hydrogen), without creating the wastes that have proved almost impossible to deal with in the United States.  The Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act specifically describes the advanced reactors it seeks to support as having all those positive characteristics.  This newest burst of enthusiasm for advanced reactors is, however, largely fueled by the idea that they will burn some of their long-lived radioisotopes, thereby becoming nuclear incinerators for some of their own waste.

Many of these “advanced” reactors are actually repackaged designs from 70 years ago.  If the United States, France, the UK, Germany, Japan, Russia, and others could not make these reactors economically viable power producers in that time, despite spending more than $60 billion, what is different now?  Moreover, all of the “advanced” designs under discussion now are simply “PowerPoint” reactors: They have not been built at scale, and, as a result, we don’t really know all the waste streams that they will produce.

It’s tempting to believe that having new nuclear power plants that serve, to some degree, as nuclear garbage disposals means there is no need for a nuclear garbage dump, but this isn’t really the case. Even in an optimistic assessment, these new plants will still produce significant amounts of high-level, long-lived waste. What’s more, new fuel forms used in some of these advanced reactors could pose waste disposal challenges not seen to date.

Some of these new reactors would use molten salt-based fuels that, when exposed to water, form highly corrosive hydrofluoric acid. Therefore, reprocessing (or some form of “conditioning”) the waste will likely be required for safety reasons before disposal. Sodium-cooled fast reactors—a “new” technology proposed to be used in some advanced reactors, including the Bill Gates-funded TerraPower reactors—face their own disposal challenges. These include dealing with the metallic uranium fuel which is pyrophoric (that is, prone to spontaneous combustion) and would need to be reprocessed into a safer form for disposal.

Unconventional reactors may reduce the level of some nuclear isotopes in the spent fuel they produce, but that won’t change what really drives requirements for our future nuclear waste repository: the heat production of spent fuel and amount of long-lived radionuclides in the waste. To put it another way, the new reactors will still need a waste repository, and it will likely need to be just as large as a repository for the waste produced by the current crop of conventional reactors.

Recycling and minimizing—even eliminating—the waste streams that many industries produce is responsible and prudent behavior. But in the context of nuclear energy, recycling is expensive, dirty, and ultimately dangerous.  Reprocessing spent nuclear fuel—which some advanced reactor designs require for safety reasons—actually produces fissile material that could be used to power nuclear weapons.  This is precisely why the United States has avoided the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel for the last four decades, despite having the world’s largest number of commercial nuclear power plants.

[…]

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Fukushima: an ongoing disaster via Red Flag

Posted on 2019/07/15 by yukimiyamotodepaul

Jack Crawford
15 July 2019

In March – on the eighth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster – Time magazine published an article with the headline: “Want to Stop Climate Change? Then It’s Time to Fall Back in Love with Nuclear Energy”. In it, the former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Hans Blix, evokes the imminent threat of climate catastrophe to argue, “There are paths out of this mess. But on March 11, 2011 [the day of the Fukushima disaster], the world’s course was diverted away from one of the most important. I am talking about nuclear energy”. He continues by criticising public fears of nuclear as irrational: “Plane crashes have not stopped us from flying, because most people know it is an effective means of travelling”. Blix speaks for the global nuclear industry, which is increasingly attempting to present itself as the solution to climate change.

But plane crashes do not kill untold numbers and spread deadly poisons over huge areas of the planet. Fukushima was and still is a horrific and ongoing human and environmental catastrophe, exposing the horrendous risks to which the powerful are willing to subject people and the planet. It should be remembered every time a pro-nuclear bureaucrat or politician exploits genuine concern about climate change to promote this deadly industry. It should never be forgotten. 

[…]

Then disaster struck. The force of the giant waves disabled the generators powering Fukushima’s cooling system. A failed cooling system allowed temperatures inside the reactors to skyrocket, reaching up to 2,300°C. Nuclear fuel rods, requiring intense underwater cooling, quickly melted. The uranium sludge (known as corium) ground through the floor and rendered three reactors an impenetrable wreck of magmatic steel, concrete and nuclear waste.

Hydrogen explosions indicated the point of no return had been reached. Toxic plumes rose from the plant, and radioactive debris spewed out. All layers of containment were breached, and radioactive fluids began to flow into the soil and the sea. The first official reaction to the crisis was to lie to the public. While the triple meltdown was in full swing, TEPCO representatives held press conferences assuring the world that the reactors were stable, that the fuel was being cooled and contained, that there was no risk to human health. The company did not acknowledge that a meltdown had taken place until the following May. In 2016, TEPCO President Naomi Hirose admitted there had been a cover-up, describing it as “extremely regrettable”.

[…]

Today, towns such as Futaba, Tomioka and Okuma are nuclear ghost towns. In them you will find a forest of metal gates, decaying buildings, shattered glass and cars wrapped in vines. The only human faces are mannequins in store windows, still dressed in the fashion of 2011. Sprawled across the highway between towns are hundreds of black bags filled with toxic dirt. They are one of the many problems of the clean-up effort. There are about 30 million one-tonne bags of radioactive topsoil, tree branches, grass and other waste. There is no safe, long-term storage place for this material. 

The clean-up is undermined by cost cutting. Workers are forced to meet strict deadlines, even if it compromises safety. “There were times when we were told to leave the contaminated topsoil and just remove the leaves so we could get everything done on schedule”, explained Minoru Ikeda, a former worker. “Sometimes we would look at each other as if to say: ‘What on earth are we doing here?’”

[…]

Scandalously, organised crime has penetrated the clean-up operations. Those with debts to the Yakuza (Japanese organised crime) have found themselves shoved into hazmat suits and set to work. The subcontracting system has allowed TEPCO to turn a blind eye to such human rights abuses.

[…]

The dangers faced by those returning to Fukushima prefecture have been a central controversy of recent years. Compelled by economic necessity, most have returned. But as of February 2019, 52,000 remain displaced, either unwilling to return or with homes in still-prohibited zones. In a recent press tour, the government repeatedly blamed “harmful rumours” for creating fear of returning as well as the Japanese public’s unwillingness to consume Fukushima’s fish and agricultural products.

[…]

Hans Blix concludes his pro-nuclear Time article by insisting, “Radiation is a force that can be destructive and dangerous if not used prudently, but it can also be tamed and used to our benefit”. But Fukushima is not just a story of nuclear technology being used imprudently. It is a story of capitalism acting as it is supposed to: putting profits ahead of the interests of the many. An untameable economic system cannot “tame” radiation. 

And those who “benefit” from the powerful nuclear industry are the same people who crave military dominance. The politicians and officials currently fighting to rebuild Japanese nuclear capability are thinking far more about the military tensions surrounding them than tackling climate change. We don’t need to a build a world full of deadly nuclear power plants to combat climate change. We need clean, renewable energy and a system that prioritises people and the planet over money and military might.

Read more at Fukushima: an ongoing disaster

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60 Years Since the Largest U.S. Nuclear Accident and Captured Federal Agencies via Common Dreams

Posted on 2019/07/14 by yukimiyamotodepaul

What is needed now is action
by
Robert Dodge

60 years ago today the largest nuclear accident in U.S. history occurred above the Southern California community of Simi Valley when the Santa Susanna Field Laboratory (SSFL) site suffered a partial nuclear meltdown. That accident, kept secret for two decades, has resulted in ongoing local health effects that persist to this day and has pitted the community health and wellbeing against corporate financial interests and captured government agencies.

SSFL, a 2850 acre site, currently owned by the Department of Energy, NASA and the largest owner being Boeing, is a former nuclear reactor and rocket engine testing site. It is located in the hills above the Simi and San Fernando Valleys, at the headwaters of the Los Angeles River. Located about 25 miles from downtown Los Angeles, originally far from population areas, the area now has around 500,000 people within 10 miles of the site. Over its years of operation, there were 10 non-contained nuclear reactors that operated on the site as well as plutonium and uranium fuel fabrication facilities and a “hot lab” where highly irradiated fuel from around the U.S. nuclear complex was shipped for decladding and examination. In addition there were tens of thousands of rocket engine tests conducted over the many years of operation.

The Sodium Reactor Experiment or SRE was the first reactor to provide commercial nuclear power to a U.S. city in Moorpark. Then on July 13, 1959, a partial meltdown occurred in which a third of the fuel experienced melting. Dr. Arjun Makhijani estimated the incident released 260 times the amount of radioactive iodine as was released from the 1979 Three Mile Island accident.

As a result of this partial meltdown and numerous other reactor accidents, radioactive fires, massive chemical contamination in handling of the radioactive and chemically contaminated toxic materials that were routinely burned in open pits through the years at the site, it remains one of the most highly contaminated sites in the country. It has widespread contamination with radionuclides such as cesium-137, strontium-90, plutonium-239 and toxic chemicals perchlorate, trichloroethylene (TCE), heavy metals and dioxins.

In 2012, the U.S. EPA released the results of an extensive radiological survey of Area IV and the Northern Buffer Zone at SSFL, and found 500 samples with radioactivity above background levels, in some cases, thousands of times over background. 

[…]

A study performed for the Federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found the incidence of key cancers, those types known to be associated with the contaminants on site, were 60% higher in the offsite population within 5 miles of the site compared to further away.

Unfortunately, these contaminants do not stay on site. When it rains, they wash off site to the Valleys below. When it blows, they become airborne and migrate offsite. The 2017 Woolsey fire is a most recent example. After initially denials, officials finally admitted the fire actually started on the field lab site burning across almost the entire site and potentially spreading toxic chemicals over the basin. Unfortunately, no adequate monitoring was performed and only began days after the flames had moved on.

Ultimately, the California Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), has regulatory oversight of the cleanup and of the responsible parties which include NASA, the Department of Energy (DOE), and Boeing. In 2010, the Department of Energy and NASA signed historic agreements with DTSC that committed them to cleaning up all detectable contamination. The agreements, or Administrative Orders on Consent (AOC), specified that the cleanup was to be completed by 2017. Boeing, which owns most of the SSFL property, refused to sign the cleanup agreements. Nevertheless, DTSC said that its normal procedures require it to defer to local governments’ land use plans and zoning, which for SSFL allow agricultural and rural residential uses. DTSC said SSFL’s zoning would thus require Boeing to conduct a cleanup equivalent to the NASA/DOE requirements. 

[…]

Melissa Bumstead, an adjacent West Hills resident whose daughter has twice survived a rare leukemia and who has mapped over 50 other rare pediatric cancers near SSFL, is bringing fresh energy and new voices into the cleanup fight. Her Change.org petition has now been signed by over 650,000 people and is helping to galvanize the community to fight for the full, promised cleanup.

Thus far, almost all local and federal elected officials have voiced concern that the cleanup agreements are being broken, especially in the wake of the Woolsey Fire. What is needed now is action. People ask how to protect themselves. The best thing people can do is fight for the full cleanup of SSFL. Each of has an opportunity to help this effort. We must contact all of our local officials and demand action today for a full cleanup of SSFL. 

Read more at 60 Years Since the Largest U.S. Nuclear Accident and Captured Federal Agencies

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特集・中越沖地震１２年　インタビュー詳細 長崎大核兵器廃絶研究センター副センター長　鈴木達治郎氏 via 新潟日報

Posted on 2019/07/14 by yukimiyamotodepaul

　東京電力柏崎刈羽原発が想定外の揺れに襲われた２００７年の中越沖地震から１６日で１２年がたつ。原発の「安全神話」は当時の被災で揺らぎ、１１年の東京電力福島第１原発事故で崩れた。平成の３０年間における原子力を巡る政策の変化や評価などについて、国の原子力委員会で委員長代理を務めた、長崎大核兵器廃絶研究センターの鈴木達治郎副センター長に聞いた。

（略）

－福島事故の際は原子力委員会の委員長代理でした。どう向き合いましたか。

「原発事故が起き、推進するかどうかも含めてゼロからの見直しが必要だと思った。子ども・被災者支援法の精神がすごく重要だ。人権を守るという立場からすると、原子力の事故は許容範囲を超える。少なくとも日本では減らした方がいいと考えるようになった」

「原子力の事故は非常にひどい結果も招く。何人が亡くなるとかではなく、環境汚染や人権の問題で考えると簡単に数値で表せない。原子力の必要性を議論する時、工学系の専門家だけで、確率論や技術論から安全だと言う時代は終わった。そう考えると原子力の将来は厳しい」

■推進、反対にかかわらず解決すべき課題も
－現状の原子力政策についてはどう考えますか。

「国はエネルギー政策などで福島事故の教訓を踏まえて反省すると言っているが、実際はそうなっていない。安全規制を新しくしたが、損害賠償法も核燃料サイクル政策もほとんど変わっていない。原発の依存度を減らすとしながら、エネルギーミックスでは重要なベースロード電源と位置付け、矛盾している。原子力拡大のための交付金制度も残っている。原発から再生可能エネルギーなど、低炭素な電源への移行を助成する仕組みにしなければ依存度は下がらない」

－原子力政策を議論する上で何が必要でしょうか。

「もちろん原子力の必要性やリスクの議論は必要だ。しかし、福島の廃炉と安全性の問題、被災者の人権、高レベル放射性廃棄物の処分、核燃料サイクルといった問題は、推進、反対にかかわらず解決しなくてはいけない。これらが解決しない限りは推進などできはしない。何をやってもリスクは残る。リスクは必ずあるという議論をしなくてはいけない。客観的な評価をし、判断できる機関がないと合理的な解決はできないし、合意形成も難しい」

■第三者委で合理的、客観的判断を

－使用済み核燃料を再利用する核燃料サイクルについては、実現が厳しいという指摘もあります。

「原発の現状を考えると政府の責任として、軟着陸する仕組みを考える必要があるだろう。これも推進、反対の立場を取らない形で第三者がサイクルの評価をして、合理的、客観的に判断すべきことだ」

「勘違いをしている人が多いのが、プルトニウムの保有量を減らすにはプルサーマルが必要で、核燃料サイクルも必要という考え方だ。政治家でもいまだに信じている人が多い。プルトニウムを減らすのは、燃やした燃料を再処理せずに捨てる『ワンススルー』（直接処分）という方法だ」＝※参照＝

－今後、社会の意思決定はどのような在り方が必要でしょうか。

「エネルギー政策を決定する仕組みの中で、専門的な知識について科学的根拠に基づいた政策決定がなされていないし、透明性もない。市民参加も少ない。これを変えない限りは合理的な政策には近づかない。国民投票や住民投票などの市民参加は、情報がきちんとあるという前提でないとできない。だからこそ法律で担保を取った形で、客観的な情報を出す仕組みや機関が必要になる」

「廃炉と復興、放射性廃棄物処分、核燃料サイクル、この三つくらいは、すぐにでも第三者委員会をつくってほしい。経済性評価のやり直しも含め、このくらいはやらないとまっとうな原子力政策にならない」

－第三者委にどのような役割を期待しますか。

「第三者機関は万能ではない。推進、反対の立場を取らないとなると、どうしても表現や結論が玉虫色になる。それでも、今の日本には第三者機関があった方が議論が活発になるだろう。推進、反対それぞれの人たちが手に持ち、議論のベースとなるような共通のレポートが日本にはない。情報提供の段階から、客観的な情報を出す仕組みが必要だ」
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　※通常の原発は、ウランを燃料として使います。原発で利用すると、ウランの一部はプルトニウムに変化します。「核燃料サイクル」では、使用済み核燃料を化学処理して、プルトニウムとまだ使えるウランを取り出します。「再処理」と呼ばれるものです。

取り出したプルトニウムをウランと混ぜてプルトニウム・ウラン混合酸化物（ＭＯＸ）燃料という新しい燃料に加工して再利用します。「プルサーマル」は、ＭＯＸ燃料を通常の原発で利用する方法です。

日本は使用済み核燃料を全量再処理することにしています。再処理の過程では再利用できない、放射能レベルの高い物質が残ります。これを「高レベル放射性廃棄物」として、地下に埋めて処分する方針です。

プルトニウムは核兵器の材料にもなり得るため、国際的に厳重な管理などが求められます。日本は国内外に約４７トンを保有し、海外から懸念されています。

全文は特集・中越沖地震１２年　インタビュー詳細 長崎大核兵器廃絶研究センター副センター長　鈴木達治郎氏

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