Organization of multinational undertakings in the nuclear field

Various proposals have been put forward to establish multinational undertakings for enrichment, fuel fabrication, reprocessing, spent fuel storage and waste management. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the legal, institutional framework aspects of multinational undertakings in the field of nuclear fuel cycle. The selection of the appropriate bodies representing the interest of participating countries would largely depend on the object or role of multinational undertakings. Regarding the principle of formation, URENCO is a much informative model of formation, which distinguishes the equity participation at national level and multinational level. The allocation of service between equity participants and non-equity participants depends on the objective of establishing business. Some priority in service allocation should be given to equity participants, and the participants having non-proliferation objective may require service allocation to avoid proliferation risk. The degree of achieving non-proliferation goal is related to the scope of participation. The experience in the field of nuclear energy seems to suggest that the concept of two-tiered decisionmaking structure is generally accepted. Various legal instruments appropriate to constitute multinational fuel cycle arrangement were examined, referring to the precedents and experience. (Kako, I.)