usable plutonium, it will only encourage countries like North Korea and Iran to do likewise," he said. There was no immediate reaction from Tokyo. Another union member, Frank von Hippel, a physicist and professor at the Science and Global Security Programme at Princeton, New Jersey, said the Rokkasho plant, if operational, could produce by 2020 a stock of plutonium equal to the current U.S. stockpile. "Separated plutonium poses a risk of theft, and such large stocks would be destabilizing," von Hippel said. The Rokkasho plant would be the first industrial-scale reprocessing plant in a country that was the world's first victim of nuclear blasts and whose constitution prohibits possession of nuclear weapons. Plutonium is separated from spent fuel from nuclear power plants and could provide weapons-usable fissile materials. Enriched uranium is another fissile material. --More 0004 Local Time 2104 GMT
