The Nuclear Safety Commission said a "sufficient technological basis has been established" to ensure the safe use of plutonium at light-water reactors, provided the ratio of MOX to total fuel of a plant is about one-third.

But the advisory panel also called for special care in an annual report on nuclear safety, citing the fuel's extremely high radioactivity level, which is 200,000 times that of a type of uranium.

The commission also reaffirmed its support for plans by the Japanese electric industry and government to use the so-called "pluthermal" method at 16-18 nuclear reactors in the country by the year 2010.

In the pluthermal process, plutonium extracted from spent nuclear fuel is combined with uranium oxide to create MOX fuel, which is then burned in light-water reactors.

The plans stalled in May last year when residents in the tiny northern Japanese village of Kariwa rejected a move by Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) to convert an existing nuclear reactor there to a pluthermal plant.

The resistance dealt a severe blow to the government's scheme to promote the method as an answer to the needs of the resource-poor nation, which relies on 51 nuclear reactors to provide about one-third of its electricity.

The pluthermal scheme took another knock in 1999 when Kansai Electric Power Co., which serves Osaka and its vicinity, suspended its planned use of MOX fuel imported from British Nuclear Fuels PLC (BNFL).

BNFL at that time was found to have falsified manufacturing data for the fuel.

The commission's annual report added it was necessary for MOX users to inspect on the spot the quality of such nuclear fuel to be shipped to Japan.

A Japanese ecology group, Green Action, said that the report was deceptive.

US Governor Says No To Nuclear Waste Dump In His State Washington (AFP) April 8, 2002 - Nevada state Governor Kenny Guinn said Monday he has signed a bill passed by the state legislature opposing President George W. Bush's plan to use the state's Yucca Mountain as the central dump for high-level nuclear waste. "Let me make one thing crystal clear: Yucca Mountain is not inevitable, and Yucca Mountain is no bargaining chip," Guinn said at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. "Yucca Mountain is not safe. It is not suitable." The bill signed Friday by Guinn throws into doubt the future of the 50-billion-dollar project. Only a vote in the US Congress can override it. Bush designated Yucca Mountain in February, saying the United States needs to consolidate its nuclear waste, currently stored in 131 above-ground sites in 39 states, with 161 million US residents living within 120 kilometers (75 miles) of the sites. A 1982 law requires him to designate a site for nuclear waste, such as spent nuclear fuel, which will be dangerous for tens of thousands of years. But critics -- including Guinn -- say the US Department of Energy has not proven that nuclear waste will not leak into ground water from the remote, arid site 145 kilometers (90 miles) from gambling capital Las Vegas.

"What the NSC (Nuclear Safety Commission) fails to inform the Japanese public and international community is that experience with MOX fuel at nuclear power plants in Japan is virtually non-existent, and that use of MOX fuel internationally is minimal when compared to use of uranium fuel," the group said in a statement.

It added that the commission had also failed to say that the "scale of MOX fuel use in Japan will be unprecedented."

"There is to be a higher concentration of plutonium in the fuel, and a higher burn-up rate," it said.

Meanwhile, a leading US nuclear waste expert cast doubt April 9 on Russian claims that its cash-strapped nuclear industry could make billions of dollars from a controversial plan to reprocess foreign nuclear waste.

James Werner, former head of nuclear waste management in the previous US administration of president Bill Clinton, said the waste reprocessing project approved last month by Russia's lower house of parliament defied market and environmental logic.

Russia's atomic energy ministry says the industry could make some 21 billion dollars (24 billion euros) over the next 10 years from reprocessing foreign nuclear waste.

"The only reason the United States ever reprocessed spent nuclear fuel was to obtain a small amount of very pure plutonium for nuclear warheads, but it was an extraordinarily expensive industrial operation," Werner told a press conference here.

"There has never been any profitable reprocessing of uranium or plutonium because the cost of the operation, the cost of managing high-level radioactive waste and the cost of security is too high," Werner added.

"At a time when the rest of the world is spending money to dispose of plutonium because we have too much, it makes no sense to produce more in reprocessing," the US expert said.

Russian President Vladimir Putin last year initiated a controversial change in the law to authorise the import of nuclear waste, which could see Russia take in an estimated 20,000 tonnes of spent fuel from abroad.

But Russia's environmental groups and some scientists have vigorously opposed the project, arguing that Russia lacks the necessary equipment and finances to safely store nuclear waste.

A recent report said that Russia had already accumulated 14,000 tonnes of high-grade nuclear waste from its own reactors and weaponry.

The United States -- the maker of nuclear power plants that account for most of the world's atomic waste -- has also warned that it will not allow spent fuel to be transferred to Russia from third countries without assurances from Moscow on its safety and security.

All rights reserved. � 2002 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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