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The plant, operating under the terms of Japan's nuclear fuel cycle policy has faced a number of obstacles such as technical problems as well as an environmental safety risks which could further delay operations.
According to Mitsuhisa Watanabe, a professor at Toyo University, "A reverse fault, which could cause a giant earthquake, is reaching just under the uranium-enrichment factory within the plant, while the reprocessing facility is a little apart from the fault. The factory must be moved to another place immediately."
In Watanabe’s opinion, “such a plant should not have been established on such soft ground." He also found an active fault under Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant in Fukui prefecture, and announced his findings at the end of May at the annual Japan Geoscience Union meeting in Chiba prefecture and in Tokyo Tuesday.
The massive Rokkasho plant, which consists of a spent fuel reprocessing facility, a uranium-enrichment factory, a low-level radioactive waste disposal center and a high-level radioactive waste management facility, has come under international spotlight, as it is the first such commercial plant in a nonnuclear-weapon state. Resource-poor Japan has decided to reprocess by extracting plutonium, which can be used to produce nuclear weapons and uranium from spent nuclear fuel.
According to Watanabe, who acknowledges the importance of nuclear power for reducing dependency on fossil fuels, the plant is built on an uplifted marine terrace on the northeast coast of the mainland, and the reverse fault may be connected to an undersea fault. In this case, the active fault could total around 62 miles, and could potentially trigger an 8-magnitude earthquake.
It is a given rule in international communities that electric companies or governments geologize candidate sites carefully to avoid building nuclear facilities near active faults. Experts agree that active faults cause earthquakes sooner or later, and if a fault is found to be longer than 3 miles in length, the energy generated could be 6 times greater.
To construct a nuclear facility, Japan's electric companies are required to undergo two inspections and also need permits from the Nuclear and Industrial Safety Agency under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and the Nuclear Safety Commission of Japan under the Cabinet Office. Some geologists and citizen groups who oppose nuclear power plants have pointed out the hazardous nature of active faults, which the electric companies and other related agencies never accepted. It is only recently that they have admitted to the existence of active faults under the facilities.
The Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd., which runs the Rokkasho plant, denied Watanabe's findings, stating, "We have confirmed that there is no active fault that needs to be taken into consideration for the earthquake-resistant design of the reprocessing plant, except the fault Watanabe mentioned, which is not situated directly under the site, but in the vicinity of the site." In addition, the JNFL denied any link between the reverse fault and the undersea faults because the undersea faults running on the outer edge of the continental shelf are older than at least 700,000 to 800,000 years and the two faults were active during different epochs and lie in different directions.
However, Taku Komatsubara, an expert in geology at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, acknowledges the two as active faults and agrees with Watanabe. At the same time, Komatsubara believes that, "JNFL's counterstatement could be accepted if we were living in 1980 but that is quite far from the current standard of active fault study.”
The JNFL submitted its seismic report in November last year to the NISA, where a public relations officer explained that it was reviewing the report and that Watanabe's findings would be taken into consideration.
Nuclear reactors that require huge amounts of water to cool their facilities are typically built along a coastline, which is usually unstable. Electric power companies and safety review agencies tend to underestimate risk or neglect unfavorable data; doing otherwise would prevent the building of such facilities in Japan, one of the world's most earthquake-prone countries. "I guess that they create the story that a potential building site is safe by deliberately ignoring active faults in order to facilitate the construction of nuclear reactors at that site," said Watanabe.
Another topographer, who spoke under the conditions of anonymity, investigated a site twenty years ago for a nuclear reactor for an electric power company. He admitted feeling uneasy when he saw the surveying technique, which differed from the standard procedure. "They deliberately neglected active faults," he acknowledged.
Protesters are wary of an active fault below or around nuclear facilities because there is the high possibility that it could be the epicenter of an earthquake that could damage a nuclear reactor from below including the reactor's water-cooling system and trigger a reactor meltdown, causing a catastrophic incident.
In the case of the Rokkasho plant, which holds roughly 3000 tons of spent nuclear fuel collected from 55 reactors in Japan, and located in an area the size of California; radiation contamination could possibly cover the whole of northern Japan.
Once the Rokkasho reprocessing facility starts operations to extract uranium and plutonium from nuclear wastes, the facility will discharge a vast amount of radioactive material into the air and ocean. The JNFL admits that the amount of radioactivity the facility discharges a day is almost similar to that produced by one of Japan's general nuclear reactor in a year. While the JNFL insists that the discharge is safe if the ingredients are diluted and spread, protesters argue that it may cause serious effects on humans as well as the environment.
The reprocessing facility also faces technical difficulties in the disposal process of the leftover radioactive waste after extracting uranium and plutonium. The material is mixed with molten glass and poured into steel containers where it is solidified and later buried.
As the technology required more research, the JNFL announced that it would finish the test to make glass canisters in July instead of May. After the test it will meet with Aomori prefecture administration officials and neighborhood communities and sign a formal agreement before starting full-scale operations. However, the problem of the newly emerged active fault undermines the reliability of the earthquake-resistance strength of the plant. That coupled with the pollution problems and technical difficulties in making glass canisters could postpone the operations further.
The negligence of safety review agencies was exposed when the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station north of Tokyo, the world's largest rated nuclear power plant, was damaged by the tremors of a 6.8-magnitude earthquake last July. An undiscovered active fault was found directly below the plant. All seven reactors remain inactive.
In September 2006, outdated earthquake-resistant design standards were revised by strict new standards. In March, in accordance with the new standards, all electric power companies announced interim reassessment reports. The report admitted the existence of an active fault just below the Mihama Nuclear Power Plant and the Monju fast-breeder nuclear reactor, which was suspended in 1995 after a natrium leakage accident in Fukui prefecture. The report also acknowledged an active fault that ran within the area of the Tsuruga Nuclear Power Plant, a finding Watanabe had declared two months earlier, which was reported by Japan's daily Mainichi Newspaper in January. This may have brought pressure on the company to acknowledge the presence of the active fault.
"Although the study of active faults is a constantly advancing field, a review was conducted only once before the construction of nuclear facilities. The government should change the system to mandate a survey every ten years," said Kazuki Koketsu, of the Earthquake Research Institute at the University of Tokyo.
Watanabe, who no longer trusts electric power companies and safety review agencies, is committed to continue surveying all nuclear facilities in Japan along with other impartial experts. "I am sure that other active faults will be found just below or around nuclear facilities," he said.
