As clearly stated in the SCJ report, “management of the total amount” has two connotations: “setting an upper limit for the total amount” and “controlling increases of the total amount.” “Setting an upper limit for the total amount” corresponds to the withdrawal from nuclear power, and the level of upper limit depends on the tempo of that withdrawal. On the other hand, “controlling increases of the total amount” corresponds to keeping nuclear power in the future with strictly controlling increases of the total amount, and the amount of disposed waste per unit of generated power must be controlled to the smallest amount possible. There are many technical options to control the increase of the total amount of HLW, for example, increasing burn-up of fuels, transmutation of radioactive nuclides, and longer temporal storage of HLW, which secure time for radioactivity to decay.

However, in fact, many readers of the SCJ report mistakenly recognized that management of the total amount means setting an upper limit for the total amount, and thus believed that SCJ proposed withdrawal from nuclear power: this is a complete misunderstanding. At the background of the proposal of management of the total amount, there is recognition that we should respond to the concerns on the limitless increase of HLW.