Japan Kills Monju but Not Breeders
In a widely expected move, the Japanese government finally killed the ill-fated Monju breeder reactor project on September 21, but reasserted its faith in breeder reactor technology as a component of the nation’s future power mix.
The Monju plant was an ambitious project that never came close to meeting its backers’ expectations. Launched in 1980, the sodium-cooled fast-breeder plant managed only 250 days of operation over its lifetime. A sodium coolant fire in 1995 and subsequent cover-up by operator Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) gave the plant a black eye from which it never recovered. An abortive attempt at a restart in 2010 led to revelations that JAEA had skipped required safety inspections on as many as 10,000 of the plant’s components.
In a scathing indictment last year, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority ruled that JAEA was not qualified to safely operate the plant and ordered the federal government to find a replacement or shut the facility down. The Japanese cabinet on Wednesday took the latter option, drawing to a close a project that burned through an estimated ¥1 trillion ($ 10 billion in 2016 dollars) with little to show for it.…
