By Hamish McDonald
China Correspondent
Beijing
January 31, 2004
The United States and China are locked in opposition over the siting of a $A39 billion nuclear fusion reactor in Japan. Scientists warn it would turn the East Asian industrial giant into a “virtual thermonuclear superpower“.
Behind the argument - ostensibly over technicalities, money and scientific prestige about the research reactor - are concerns that it would provide Japan with a ready supply of the last ingredient it needs to build advanced nuclear weapons at short notice.
The International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor is planned to create the world’s first sustained nuclear fusion reaction, combining hydrogen atoms, in the same way that the sun’s energy is created and thermonuclear or hydrogen bombs explode, and thereby create an abundant source of cheap energy whose main byproduct is water.
But two respected nuclear physicists, Andre Gsponer and Jean-Pierre Hurni of the Geneva-based Independent Scientific Research Institute, point out in a paper published last week that the reactor will provide a massive supply of the heavy hydrogen isotope tritium, which can be used to boost atomic fission explosions and allow smaller warheads to fit on missiles.
Six nations are involved in a consortium to build the expensive reactor. The US and South Korea favour a site at Rokkasho, a small fishing port close to a US military base in northern Japan.
Russia and China favour a location in Cadarache, near Marseille in France, which is one of the five powers with nuclear weapons status recognised under the global Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty.
The US position is seen in France as another part of the punishment for not supporting its war in Iraq, but the Chinese opposition, reiterated this week by a Foreign Ministry spokesman without giving reasons, appears motivated by concern at Japan’s access to tritium-based technology.
Faced with the split in the consortium, Japan this week suggested it might somehow “share“ the project with France, and the US is reviewing its stand. “We have a preference (for Japan) at this time based on technical considerations,“ US presidential scientific adviser John Marburger told a media briefing in Paris on Thursday. “It could change.“
The two Swiss physicists did not deal with the safety and environmental risks of such a reactor, which could include accidental dispersal of hazardous materials and problems of storing low-grade radioactive waste created by the bombardment of structural materials by neutrons.
But they pointed out that a project involving large amounts of tritium - when a few grams are enough to boost an atomic bomb made of plutonium or enriched uranium - had implications for nuclear arms control.
