Areva ships MOx to Japan

[Enthalpy]

Japanese electricity producers had bought MOx ("mixture of oxides"), a nuclear fuel that mixes less-enriched uranium with plutonium resulting from the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel. After the Fukushima disaster, especially as people realized that the higher reactivity of MOx to fast neutrons would let it behave differently if water evaporated from the spent fuel pool #4, and maybe as the Japanese gouvernment understood that other countries could just steal the shipment, the old Japanese government asked to stop all shipments of MOx.

 

These days, Areva wants to ship MOx again to Japan. If we were to believe newspapers, Japanese electricity producers have no use for it (credible with just two reactors active), but Areva doesn't want to store it any longer, so it shall be stored in Japan instead, and the new Japanese government didn't oppose it.

 

The roughly 400kg contained plutonium suffice to make 30 bombs. Areva argue that it's "civilian" plutonium containing much ²⁴⁰Pu that makes it unsuitable for bombs, but this is BS. A standard Pu bomb does detonate with "civilian" plutonium, with a yield on only 500t instead of 15kt - so the devastation radius is 1/3 that at Hiroshima. Worse: every book tells that a so-called booster lets civilian plutonium detonate as efficiently as military one does. It takes a little bit of tritium, which a country controlling a nuclear reactor has.

 

Now, imagine the effort and sacrifices made by, say, North Korea, to have plutonium for its nuclear bombs. The shipment passes by, whose contained plutonium is separated just by chemical means. Stealing the shipment is a much smaller effort! 30 soldiers on board won't stop a country willing to save a decade and hundreds of technicians. The story doesn't tell if a submarine escorts the shipment, but for instance North Korea does have submarines as well. And how much does this escort cost to the French taxpayer, as compared with Areva's sale?

 

I previously thought MOx was a means to destroy the huge amounts of plutonium now available on Earth, but fuel reprocessing to MOx at La Hague and a few others is done only once; the second reprocessing would be too costly, and the new plutonium is left in it. So we still sit on the hundreds of tons of plutonium.

 

That's an insane story... Or could there be an alternative explanation? Japan willing to make quickly from the MOx a few almost-complete nuclear bombs, for balanced deterrence with North Korea?