Johanna Faust, a mixed race Jew, prefers to publish pseudonymously. She is committed: first, to preventing war, ecological disaster, and nuclear apocalypse; last to not only fighting for personal privacy & the freedom of information, but, by representing herself as a soldier in that fight, to exhorting others to do the same. She is a poet, always. All these efforts find representation here: "ah, Mephistophelis" is so named after the last line of Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, whose heretical success flouted the censor for a time. 













































































































































          

        

          

        










Peaceful Intentions Notwithstanding, Japan Sure Has A LOT Of Weaponizeable Plutonium





















Rokkasho Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Facility, Wikimedia Commons.





 A whole lot.



Intimations of non peaceable intent (see "Japan to rethink pacifist constitution by 2020 amid rising tensions," RT, and "For 'no war' Article 9, any reinterpretation will do," The Japan Times, for starters, as well as this really interesting bit of conspiracy) aside, we are left with the possibility of nuclear terrorism that cannot but loom in the collective dark cloud of Western media.



In it are perhaps clues, no? 



As if the threat was more credible than that of a reemergent desire for self sufficiency in the defense sector.  This having de facto happened rather recently -- with Fukushima --  is of course irrelevant when calculating future risk.



Excerpted from

"Japan could be building an irresistible terrorist target, experts say"

by the Center for Public Integrity, their own 'Key Findings:'















    

  • Publicly, the United States has said little about Japan’s plans to enlarge its existing stockpile of plutonium. But since President Obama was elected, Washington has been furiously lobbying behind the scenes, trying to persuade Japanese officials that terrorists might regard the Rokkasho plant as an irresistible target
    • 

  • Japan has resisted upgrading its security force or requiring background security checks for the 2,400 workers there, similar to those in the U.S.
    • 

  • Confidential U.S. diplomatic cables note police officers who are asleep, express chagrin that Japanese guards do not carry weapons and criticize the government for staging unrealistic training exercises, while relying too heavily on what its nuclear utility companies decide to do.
    • 

  • Japan’s prime minister at the time of the Fukushima disaster — Naoto Kan — said “Japan is not prepared for such attacks.”
    • 

  • The International Atomic Energy Agency is formally responsible for ensuring that plutonium does not leak from the Rokkasho plant without detection. But the system it has installed there is only 99 percent accurate, meaning that enough plutonium for 26 nuclear bombs a year could still be removed without a trace.
    • 

  • Companies with ties to the yakuza, or Japanese organized crime syndicates, are heavily involved in the nuclear industry.
    • 














To which I would add this as well:











    

  • Publicly, the United States has said little about Japan’s plans to enlarge its already substantial hoard of plutonium. Washington formally granted Japan the unlimited right to use U.S. technology and nuclear feedstock for the plant during the Reagan administration. Now some of that materiel is to be returned, under a deal to be announced later this month at a U.S.-led international summit in the Netherlands promoting the security of nuclear materials that can be used as explosives.
    • 

  • It all sounds calm and cordial. But since Obama was first elected, Washington has been lobbying furiously behind the scenes, trying to persuade Japan that terrorists might regard Rokkasho’s new stockpile of plutonium as an irresistible target — and to convince Japanese officials they should better protect this dangerous raw material.
    • 










...and with it, a raised eyebrow.  Plutonium from the Reagan years is no longer viable; must have been reprocessed.  One would think they had warlike intentions from this, but, of course, the answer would seem a resounding no...



...that is, if that word existed in Japanese.








When the Nuclear Fuel Reprocessing Center at Rokkasho is operating at full capacity, it’s supposed to produce eight metric tons of plutonium annually. That’s enough in theory for a country like Japan to make an estimated 2,600 nuclear weapons, each with the explosive force of 20,000 tons of TNT.

When the Rokkasho plant was conceived, Japan believed plutonium-burning reactors would make the island nation energy independent. The facility was embraced as a way to convert nuclear wastes into fuel on a crowded archipelago rocked by violent earthquakes, dotted with active volcanoes, and lashed by tsunamis and typhoons.


Critics of the plant point out, however, that Japan has no urgent need for a single kilogram of the plutonium the plant will produce.

Read more













Tokai One and Two, Wikimedia Commons











Be seeing you.















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