Opening Address: Japan's Nuclear Reactor Strategy

Thank you very much Mr. Chairman for your kind introduction. Distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen, it is a great pleasure for me to have the chance to address you here in Kyoto at this 'International Conference on Fast Reactors and Related Fuel Cycles (FR09)'. At the outset, I would like to thank the IAEA for organizing this conference and, taking this opportunity, I would like to assure its new Director General, Y. Amano, of Japan's continuing support for the IAEA. I am looking forward to continuing to work with the IAEA in order to extend the benefits of the peaceful uses of nuclear energy and science and technology to a global population. We are witnessing today a global emergence of interest in the construction of nuclear power plants. There are a number of reasons for this. Major factors are the urgent and ever growing need for energy, particularly in the developing world, fluctuations in fossil fuel prices, the pursuit of security of energy supply and the growing recognition of the need to combat global warming. Despite the global economic crisis, the IAEA's latest projections continue to show a significant increase in nuclear generating capacity in the medium term. The low projection for 2030 is now 511 GW(e) of generating capacity, compared with 370 GW(e) today. The high projection is 807 GW(e); more than a doubling of present levels. Most of the 30 countries that already use nuclear power plan to expand their output. Growth targets have been raised significantly in China, India and the Russian Federation. In addition, according to the IAEA, some 50 countries - mostly in the developing world - have informed the IAEA that they might be interested in launching nuclear power programmes and 12 of these are actively considering nuclear power. Even in the high case projection, however, nuclear power's share of global power generation will go down from the current 16% level to 14% by 2030 and then rise to 22% by 2050, according to the projection published by the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency in 20081. In other words, the growth of nuclear power in the global power sector will not be able to keep pace with the growth in global electricity demand, at least in the medium term. Then what should the global nuclear community do before 'dawn', preparing for the day when nuclear energy will play the leading role in global energy supply. My answer is, let us promote carefully planned yet highly aggressive actions across three different time frames: short term, medium term and long term. The major short term action should be to continue to operate existing reactors safely and reliably, maintaining the public's trust in both plant operators' safety management and the government's regulatory activities for safety and security. In the case of Japan, urgent action in this category is to complete the reevaluation of the seismic safety of every nuclear facility in Japan, taking into consideration lessons learned from the July 2007 seismic event at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant on the propagation of the seismic wave generated in a nearby fault, in which the seismic input to the plant significantly exceeded the level of the design basis seismic input. It is to be hoped that this review for the prototype Monju fast breeder reactor will be completed very soon. The major medium term actions in the case of Japan are to add new generating capacity steadily, to operate the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant steadily and to construct intermediate spent fuel storage facilities in a timely manner, to provide assistance to countries that are considering introducing nuclear power to build the necessary infrastructure and to train a young generation of nuclear scientists and engineers who are to sustain the development and utilization of nuclear energy in the future. One of the major long term actions should be to promote research and development programmes that exploit nuclear energy's innate feature, namely, its economically harvestable resource base, which is good for a millennium, by closing the nuclear fuel cycles using fast neutron reactors. You have gathered here in Kyoto to discuss the challenges and opportunities of this programme. I am sure that this city is one of the best places in the world for having discussions about such long term issues, since Kyoto had been the capital of Japan for more than a thousand years and it has a rich and unique cultural approach to long term prosperity. In the previous century, there were several active fast breeder reactor R and D programmes being pursued worldwide. However, commercial development of fast reactors was put on hold in the 1980s and 1990s for several reasons, but primarily because they were projected as being uncompetitive. At the start of this century, however, recognizing that the environmental benefits of nuclear energy could even extend to other energy products besides electricity by the latter part of this century, not a few countries have started to consider it wise to promote, as a long term action, a significant R and D effort on fast reactors and closed nuclear fuel cycles that meet the technology goals in sustainability, economics, safety and reliability, proliferation resistance and physical protection that will help nuclear energy play an essential worldwide role in the future.