By Karen Fredericks
One hundred Greenpeace activists from across Europe chained themselves to the main gates of the French plutonium reprocessing factory on the morning of October 14. Their aim was to alert the world to the danger posed by plans to move 1.7 tonnes of deadly plutonium from France to Japan.
The day before, French naval police had arrested four Greenpeace campaigners and confiscated their vessel, Beluga, when it anchored in a restricted zone in the harbour of Cherbourg, where the Japanese freighter Akatsuki Maru will dock to pick up the plutonium cargo.
Greenpeace had earlier announced that it would tail the Akatsuki Maru and warn all nations along its route of the danger of the ship's cargo.
Both the route and the departure time are closely guarded secrets, although anti-nuclear activists tip late November as the probable date. One of the countries on the route could well be Australia. Â鶹´«Ã½ spoke to Australian Greenpeace anti- nuclear campaigner Jean McSorley about the shipment, the Japanese nuclear industry and the attitude of the Australian government to both problems.
The forthcoming voyage of the Akatsuki Maru, the ship they call "the floating Chernobyl", is supposed to be the first of a series of plutonium shipments by which Japan plans to transport between 30 and 50 tonnes of the radioactive material from France and Britain over the next 20 years.
The plutonium is for use in both conventional nuclear reactors, which now provide over one quarter of Japan's electricity, and in a new generation of fast breeder reactors (FBR) which actually produce more plutonium than they use. Japan hopes to develop a virtual "closed system" of fast breeder reactors that will not require European supplies of plutonium by the year 2000 and which will provide all Japan's energy requirements by the late 21st century.
Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances on the planet, and remains toxic for a very long time, with a half-life of 24,000 years. The ingestion or inhalation of one-millionth of a gram of plutonium is sufficient to cause cancer, and it enters the food chain with great ease. William J. Dircks of the International Atomic Energy Agency has called the amassing of plutonium stocks on the scale proposed by Japan "a major political and
security problem worldwide".
Failed technology
Greenpeace has pointed out that FBR technology has been a dismal failure internationally. OECD figures show that member nations have spent A$62 billion on a technology that has produced only 35,322,130 MWh of electricity — an amount that could be produced by wind turbines in California in 2
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Japan's is the only government pursuing the technology on a serious basis. Greenpeace says that Japan, panicked by the oil crises in the '70s, became committed to plutonium production before the difficulties became obvious, and has remained inflexible on the issue.
Greenpeace aims to stop the plutonium industry, and its campaign against the voyage of the Akatsuki Maru has placed Japan, the last remaining bastion of civil plutonium use, squarely within its sights.
"Japan is a classic example of a first world country which wastes energy phenomenally", says Jean McSorley. "They must begin to look at energy conservation, alternative energy, scaling down energy use.
"When you look at Japan, you can see that it is nonsense to say that the first world uses good technology and the developing countries use bad technology. If Japan is supposedly one of the most technologically competent, and it is certainly one of the richest nations on the planet, then they should really be leading the way instead of pursuing this reckless technology.
"A royal commission report in England in 1976 was so concerned about the dangers of plutonium shipment that it emphasised that there are alternative energy sources and that all steps must be taken to use them, rather than go down the 'plutonium economy' path." Japan has not heeded such warnings.
The dangers involved in the shipment include on-board fires and collisions, accidents during loading or unloading and terrorism or hijacking. The cargo of plutonium is sufficient to build 120 nuclear bombs of comparable size with the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki in 1945.
International protests
"Greenpeace and other groups have been lobbying like mad in every international forum we can think of to alert people to this
problem", says McSorley. "A number of countries which may have the ship pass near them are quite alarmed at the prospect. What we have seen is a response from a very much alerted international community.
"Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia have now said the ship should not go through the Straits of Malacca. They can't actually ban the ship from that area because it is international waters, but they've said that they don't want it to go through there, and it would create too much of a stink if Japan forced the issue.
"What we are seeing, really, is the response of informed people, unlike the situation when the first shipment left years ago — the Seishin Maru in 1984, the trial shipment. Nobody knew about it, and the risks were not known."
Many international forums, such as the South Pacific Forum, have expressed strong concerns to the Japanese government and requested consultation with affected countries.
Australian government
Disturbingly, the South Pacific Forum motions (prompted particularly by the concerns of Nauru and Micronesia) were diluted somewhat through the intervention of the Australian delegate, says McSorley:
"One of the key issues for Australian anti-nuclear activists is that when the South Pacific Forum were debating this issue, and putting together their letter of protest, the Australian delegate had the whole resolution watered down. Greenpeace believes that was because the Australian government is embarrassed over the fact that Australia also wants to send spent nuclear fuel shipments through the waters of the South Pacific region. Our government is talking about moving the spent fuel from Lucas Heights to the US via that route.
"So Greenpeace Australia is now campaigning around two things: one is we stop the Japanese dealing in deadly cargoes, and the other is that we set an example by not considering doing this ourselves."
Anti-nuclear groups internationally have identified three possible routes the plutonium ship may take: 1. through the Panama Canal via the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans; 2. around Cape Horn, also via the Atlantic and Pacific; 3. around the Cape of Good Hope, via the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. If the route is the third, and that seems likely, then the ship will have to pass around Australia, approaching Japan from the central and western Pacific. Jean McSorley says that, even on the parochial level of security for its own citizens, the Australian government, like
the US, has made an inadequate and unrealistic response.
"The Australian government hasn't really commented on whether the ship can come into Australian waters. The Japanese have said that it will not go within 200 nautical miles of the coast of any nation, so in theory it won't go into any waters except those of France and Japan. Our government has loosely indicated that it believes it has the capacity to deal with any problems that would arise on a ship that did come into our waters. Apart from that, they just say they've spoken to the Japanese about it and they believe Japanese assurances that they won't come into our economic zone of exclusion."
The campaign around the Akatsuki Maru is only a part of the Greenpeace campaign against the plutonium industry. McSorley says the group does not believe it will necessarily stop this shipment, but it will certainly continue its assault on the veil of secrecy surrounding it:
"They won't be able to keep their leaving time a secret because the whole area of Cherbourg is being watched very closely. The ship will not be able to leave without being spotted. We will follow the ship, and as it passes various countries we will alert the governments of those nations. If the Japanese government will not assume responsibility as a global citizen, then we'll do it for them.
"Physically, Greenpeace can't stop the ship. It would not only be reckless because of the danger from the cargo, but we are also internationally enjoined against interfering with the passage of any ships belonging to Pacific Nuclear Transport, which is the parent company who own [the Akatsuki Maru].
"However, we have very high hopes of stopping the plutonium trade, and that's the key thing. The Japanese may get one ship through, but we believe that we will stop the plutonium trade, and we'll stop plutonium production. Japan is the cornerstone of civil plutonium production. We've seen, for various reasons, the cessation of military production around the world, and we are going to stop the civil industry."