Aomori Gov. Shingo Mimura urged the central government Wednesday to maintain the long-standing plan to reprocess spent nuclear fuel, saying the state should not act in a manner that would undermine years of cooperation with his prefecture over the issue.
The current policy aims to reprocess all spent nuclear fuel and reuse the extracted plutonium and uranium as reactor fuel. But if the government decides to end atomic power, there would be no point in pursuing fuel-recycling.
The government is on the verge of announcing a new energy mix vis-a-vis nuclear power in consideration of the triple-meltdown crisis at the Fukushima No. 1 atomic plant, proposing three options for the level of reliance on such energy by 2030: zero percent, 15 percent and 20 to 25 percent — compared with 26 percent in 2010.