It’s official! An experimental, widely expensive nuclear technology guaranteed to produce great amounts of weapons-grade plutonium in a geopolitical region teetering towards instability is here to stay.

On Tuesday the Kanazawa branch of the Nagoya High Court overturned a lower court’s 2003 decision that had nullified the government’s 1983 approval to build a prototype fast-breeder reactor. Got that? The government is finally free to back breeders, in a big way!

The reactor in question is nicknamed “Monju” after the eponymous Buddhist diety representing wisdom (“We have some serious problems with their choice of name for the facility,” said a monk residing at a nearby Zen monastery) and is located in Tsuruga, Fukui Prefecture.

Monju, run by the quasi-governmental Japan Nuclear Cycle Development Institute, has been mothballed since 1995, when it was shut down after a serious accident involving a sodium coolant leak and requisite cover-up.

Sodium burns when exposed to oxygen, and the resulting 1500 degree fire severely damaged the interior of the reactor.

Nuclear accidents (oh, it’s just another heavy-water leak, nothing too serious) are a fact of life in Fukui Prefecture, which is home to 15 nuclear reactors at five sites sprinkled along a stretch of coast on the Japan Sea, just north of Kyoto.

Most recently, five contract workers died in 2004 at a Kansai Power facility near Tsuruga after being scalded by water from a burst coolant pipe. Pressurized, superheated water is extremely corrosive to the pipe that contains it; in this particular case, the coolant pipe had never been replaced in the 30 years since the plant had been built.

In fact, the maintenance contractor who had employed the doomed workers had actually informed Kansai Power about the problem, but the recommendations were ignored, probably because deregulation has made it just too expensive to follow every niggling little rule.

Although accidents, cover-ups and general incompetence have continued to plague the industry in Japan (quick – what’s the Japanese for ‘criticality incident’?) there are no plans to reduce the country’s reliance on nuclear energy.

Nuclear power supplies about 35 percent of Japan’s energy needs – there are 53 nuclear power plants in Japan, compared to 57 in France and 103 in the United States.

All commercial nuclear reactors here (and this includes Monju and other reactors like it) employ nuclear fission as the basis of power production. Typically, most nuclear power plants use simpler thermal technology to generate power, rather than the more complex (and more problematic) “fast” technology found in breeder reactors.

Thermal reactors are powered by lower-grade uranium isotopes, which is disadvantageous because the by-product is nuclear waste (never a very popular commodity with inhabitants of an island nation), and also because Japan is still left with the problem of importing nuclear fuel, usually from Australia.

However, from a Japanese bureaucrat’s point of view, breeder reactors solve both problems: nuclear waste from conventional reactors can be reprocessed or recycled into high-grade plutonium to be used in breeder reactors. Even better, breeder reactors have the added benefit of producing more fuel than they consume, with the result being the creation of a “plutonium economy,” and energy self-sufficiency for Japan. You can eat plutonium, can’t you?

Japan already has plenty of plutonium stockpiled around the globe – 5.7 tonnes is currently being stored at a facility in Gifu Prefecture, north of Nagoya, with an additional 38 tonnes of separated reactor-grade plutonium being stored at reprocessing facilities in France, Germany and England.

And by the way – because storage facilities just don’t exist, each and every nuclear power plant around Japan is home to tonnes and tonnes of low level (read: not plutonium) waste that is typically stored in containment pools.

There are massive financial and political costs associated with storing plutonium and reprocessed fuel overseas, so there has been intense pressure to repatriate Japan’s nuclear materials. As a result, a US$20 billion waste storage and reprocessing facility (often described as the world’s most expensive public works project) has been built at Rokkasho-mura, in the northern prefecture of Aomori.

Commercial operation of the plant has been suspended seven times since construction started in 1984, with the current opening date set for some time in 2007.

In the meantime, the Japanese government is trying to pressure the nation’s power utilities to use MOX “pluthermal” fuel. MOX is a mixture of plutonium and reprocessed uranium, And, one “benefit” of using it is that the resultant waste is so highly radioactive that it can never be reprocessed into weapons-grade fuel by terrorists.

However, there is some doubt as to how safe it would be to burn the fuel in conventional thermal power plants, and politicians in Fukushima and Niigata, after facing strong opposition from local residents, have refused to allow reactors to burn MOX fuel within those prefectures.

Even worse, in 1999 the first shipment of MOX fuel to Japan, bound for a thermal reactor in Fukui, had to be returned to the English reprocessing facility because of fraud. The records detailing the actual plutonium content of the MOX had been fabricated, and to this date no reactor has ever used MOX as fuel in Japan.

Besides the obvious costs of reprocessing or disposing of waste, or just running a nuclear power plant, Japan’s utilities are being shaken down by the various municipalities that host nuclear facilities and demand expensive compensation packages for that privilege.

It’s unclear why MOX or breeder reactors are even being pushed at all. As sources of energy go, plain old uranium is cheap, readily available, and – dare one say it – safe. In any event, a recent government study showed that, if costs are projected over the next 60 years, it would be significantly more expensive to reprocess fuel rather than directly dispose of the waste.

So why opt for a plutonium economy? The conventional argument is that breeder reactors offer Japan a way to meet its energy needs, and the technology also allows nuclear fuel to be “recycled” rather than disposed of.

However, a substantial amount of plutonium already exists in Japan, and even more in other parts of the world – probably more than the industry could ever hope to use to produce power.

There is one other use for all that plutonium, so get your naval ensign ready for when Japan tests its first nuclear bomb. Why bother with “domiciles” on Takeshima when a good old nuke will wipe Tok-do off the map.