IAEA’s Response to Green Action’s Joint Open Letter to Director General Mohamed ElBaradei

[PDF: 844KB] 7 September 2007To:— IAEA Expert Mission to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa Nuclear Power Station— Director General Mohamed ElBaradei, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) On 6 August 2007, we wrote to you concerning the IAEA Expert Mission to the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant. In particular, we requested that the Expert Mission “not permit its report to be used…to diminish the significance of…the risks posed by earthquakes to nuclear power generation.” The Expert Mission failed on this count. It is highly regrettable that, on the basis of less than three days at the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant, without seeing inside the reactors, the Expert Mission’s report issued 17 August, 2007,* made statements…

[Word (86KB)] [Japanese version] 26 April 2007 Dear Professor James Lovelock, We wish to express our deep respect for your keen insight in sounding the alarm from a very early stage concerning the threat of global warming to human society and the ecosystem of the planet, and for explaining through your “Gaia Theory” how the planet behaves as one being. At the same time, however, we cannot agree with your view that maximizing the use of nuclear fission energy 1 is an appropriate way to address global warming. At the 43rd anniversary symposium commemorating Nuclear Energy Day organized by the Japan Atomic Energy Relations Organization (JAERO) on 25 October 2006,…

[Joint letter sent from Green Action, Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center, and Greenpeace Japan] Director General Mohamed ElBaradeiInternational Atomic Energy AgencyIAEA SecretariatHeadquarters OfficesA-1400 Vienna, Austria Re: ROKKASHO REPROCESSING PLANT AND JAPANESE ELECTRIC UTILITIES’ PLUTONIUM UTILIZATION PLANS Dear Director General ElBaradei: On 5 January 2006 we sent you a petition urging you to ensure that Japan does not breach its international commitment to the principle of “no surplus plutonium” and to quickly take appropriate action before active testing begins at Rokkasho and plutonium is accumulated. The following day the Federation of Electric Power Companies of Japan (FEPCO) published its Plutonium Utilization Plan. Attached please find a media briefing we issued today. It…

21 June 2018 Dear Director General Yukiya Amano, We are writing to you in advance of a submission by the Government of Japan on its plutonium stockpiling program. It is our understanding that the IAEA will receive by the end of this month an explanation from the Abe administration on how Japan intends to respond to growing international criticism of its plutonium stocks, which in 2016 stood at 46,900 kilograms. As with its earlier commitment to maintain its plutonium stockpile to the minimum level made by the Abe administration at the Hague Summit in 2014, we predict the same meaningless rhetorical commitments in June 2018. The information to be submitted…

Letters sent to countries potentially on the route of the MOX fuel shipment This is a follow-up letter to the letter we sent you on 5 March concerning an imminent plutonium shipment (MOX fuel) from France to Japan that may pass by your country. The Japanese electric utility Kansai Electric announced in a press release yesterday, 21 March, that it plans to ship MOX fuel from France to Japan. They did not disclose the date. This Kansai Electric press release and the French company AREVA’s announcement on 20 March confirm that the shipment is indeed imminent. Our information continues to be that the British flagged transport vessels Pacific Heron and…

To Delegates to the 2010 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference Restart of Japan’s Monju Fast Breeder Reactor – Implications for Nuclear Proliferation, Nuclear Safety and Energy Supply On May 6, Japan’s Monju Prototype Fast Breeder Reactor(1) was restarted, after being shut down for over 14 years due to an accident involving a sodium leak and a fire. It is a great irony that a plutonium-fueled fast breeder reactor was restarted at a time when unprecedented international attention is being given to nuclear disarmament, non-proliferation and security. We wish to draw your attention to some of the implications of the Monju restart, in particular in relation to nuclear proliferation, nuclear safety…