Former pro nuclear PM Nakasone now wants Japan to switch to solar eneergy
..technological problems as well as accidents delayed progress in the nuclear fuel recycling program. As a result, Japan has stockpiled about 10 tons of plutonium, enough to produce 1,250 nuclear weapons…..
Nakasone admitted in a June 2011 message that nuclear energy was capable of doing major damage to humanity and said, “I want to make Japan into a solar power nation by skillfully using solar energy.”
NUCLEAR LEVERAGE: Long an advocate of nuclear energy, Nakasone now says Japan should go solar, Asahi.com, BY TAKUYA SUZUKI, 22 July 11, Japan is the only non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council permitted under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty to have a nuclear fuel recycling program.
When Yasuhiro Nakasone was prime minister, he obtained the backing of the United States to become a nation capable of possessing large amounts of plutonium that can be used in nuclear weapons, notwithstanding the fact that Japan is the only nation on which atomic bombs have been dropped…..
when Nakasone served as head of the then Defense Agency in 1970, he invited a private group of experts to carry out research on the pros and cons of possessing nuclear weapons.
In a past publication, Nakasone has written, “With 200 billion yen ($2.5 billion at current exchange rates) in funds of that time, we would have been able within five years” to possess such weapons……
Regarding Japan’s nuclear fuel recycling program, Nakasone said in a dialogue that was published in the monthly magazine Voice, “Japan would be able to achieve it independently without importing fuel from abroad.”
However, many experts held the view that Nakasone’s true desire was to leave open the possibility of Japan having the latent ability to build nuclear weapons….
In September 1987, at what would prove to be the last summit meeting between Nakasone and Reagan, Nakasone asked that the nuclear energy agreement be revised. Reagan indicated he would not oppose such a revision.
Two months later, Japan and the United States signed the revised agreement that gave Tokyo the ability to possess a large volume of plutonium until 2018.
However, technological problems as well as accidents delayed progress in the nuclear fuel recycling program. As a result, Japan has stockpiled about 10 tons of plutonium, enough to produce 1,250 nuclear weapons…..
The central government has run into problems cooling the storage pools at the Fukushima reactors that hold spent nuclear fuel.
An increasing number of government officials have begun to feel that the government will have to abandon the nuclear fuel recycling program.
That would mean nothing more than also abandoning the latent ability to possess nuclear weapons that has been passed down secretly and believed in by a small group of politicians, bureaucrats and scholars who feel such an ability is necessary for Japan to truly become an independent nation.
Nakasone was one of those who long held that belief.
However, in June, about three months after the Fukushima nuclear accident, Nakasone sent a video message to a conference that sought to spread solar power generation in Japan.
Nakasone admitted in the message that nuclear energy was capable of doing major damage to humanity and said, “I want to make Japan into a solar power nation by skillfully using solar energy.”
That statement by the 93-year-old who had long pushed nuclear energy as a national policy was an expression of a drastic change in energy policy even before any such move was even being considered by the opposition Liberal Democratic Party that he once led.
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