Date

Jul 30, 1977

Description

With Japanese Prime Minister Fukuda seeing Japan's nuclear energy goals as "life and death" matters, President Carter agreed to a compromise on starting up the Tokai Mura reprocessing plant without backtracking on his objective of avoiding hasty reprocessing and plutonium stockpiling. When negotiations began during the summer of 1977, State Department officials developed three options. One was the experimental operation of the plant as a "test-bed" for an IAEA safeguards program. The second was reprocessing with a limited amount of irradiated fuel, with Japanese agreement to begin a major experiment in "co-processing," a blend of plutonium and uranium that could be used to operate light water reactors, but not to fuel a weapon. The third option required the modification of Tokai so that it could "perform only experimental work on coprocessing." While the Japanese disliked that option because it meant a delayed a start-up for Tokai Mura, Carter had suggested it because it would avoid the further spread of reprocessing.

The State Department recommended option 2 precisely because it would enable the Japanese to begin reprocessing while requiring them to experiment with an alternative. Carter approved that option and Smith, recently appointed as the administration's nonproliferation ambassador-at large, went to Tokyo to negotiate the final agreement.

Source

Smith records, box 17, Tokai Mura Agreement 9/12/1977

Document published in following posting(s):

Japan Plutonium Overhang Origins and Dangers Debated by U.S. Officials

Jun 8, 2017