Ship with reprocessed nuclear fuel docks in JapanAn armed vessel docked at a central Japanese port carrying the nation's first consignment The delivery of goods to a carrier to be shipped to a designated person for sale. A Bailment of goods for sale. A consignment is an arrangement resulting from a contract in which one person, the consignor, either ships or entrusts goods to another, the of reprocessed nuclear fuel to land here in eight years. The Pacific Heron, a specially adapted ship with a British police team on board to guard against possible hijack, arrived in the port of Omaezaki more than two months after leaving France. The convoy, carrying the MOX fuel Mixed oxide, or MOX fuel, is a blend of oxides of plutonium and natural uranium, reprocessed uranium, or depleted uranium which behaves similarly (though not identically) to the low enriched uranium feed for which most nuclear reactors were designed. -- a blend of plutonium plutonium (pl  tō`nēəm), radioactive chemical element; symbol Pu; at. no. 94; mass no. of most stable isotope 244; m.p. 641°C;; b.p. 3,232°C;; sp. gr. 19. and reprocessed uranium Reprocessed uranium (RepU) is the uranium recovered from nuclear fuel reprocessing. This uranium actually makes up the bulk of the material separated during reprocessing. Spent fuel contains, on average, only four percent plutonium, minor actinides and fission products by weight. -- is expected to unload To remove a program from memory or take a tape or disk out of its drive. part of the shipment here and continue its journey to two other ports near nuclear plants in southwestern Japan.
Officials have not revealed where and when the shipments will be unloaded, citing fears of terrorist attacks. Three Japanese power companies -- Kyushu Electric, Shikoku Electric and Chubu Electric -- ordered the MOX fuel, which was recycled by French nuclear giant Areva. Japan, the world's second largest economy, has virtually no energy sources of its own and relies on nuclear power to meet nearly one-third of its needs. It is looking to use MOX MOX Mixed Oxide (plutonium/uranium nuclear fuel) MOX Metal Oxide MOX Modified Oxford (Agar) MOX Magic Office MOX Microsoft Office Open Xml MOX Mapped Objects Xml as nuclear fuel for the first time. Japan has obtained MOX before -- the last shipment was eight years ago -- but none has actually been used in the country due to a data cover-up scandal and a series of accidents at nuclear plants. The environmental group Greenpeace says the latest shipment of MOX fuel is "the largest shipment of plutonium in history" -- a total of 1.8 tonnes, or an amount reportedly enough to make 225 nuclear weapons. A dozen Coast Guard ships patrolled at sea and police stood by on land as the Pacific Heron anchored at a special pier in this fishing port in central Shizuoka prefecture. The MOX fuel being unloaded in Omaezaki will be transported by land a short distance to Chubu Electric's Hamaoka nuclear plant. "Chubu Electric is saying that using MOX is like driving a car with better gasoline, but if an accident occurs the damage would not even be comparable to what they use now," said environmental campaigner Eiichi Nagano, 88. "Plutonium is highly toxic highly toxic Occupational medicine adjective Referring to a chemical that 1. Has a median lethal dose–LD50 of ≤ 50 mg/kg when administered orally to 200-300 g albino rats 2. substance," he said. "We are most concerned about an earthquake that could hit the nuclear facility." Japan experiences some 20 percent of the world's most powerful quakes and people in this prefecture have been bracing bracing, n a resistance to the horizontal components of masticatory force. for "the big one" for decades. Public concerns mounted in 2007 when a major earthquake caused a fire and a small radiation leak at the world's biggest nuclear plant, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa northwest of Tokyo. 
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