South Korea in focus: The politics of spent fuel storage and disposal

Abstract

In 2010, South Korea’s nuclear power reactors generated 31.4 percent of the country’s total electricity—by 2030 the government plans to have 19 more reactors online, increasing even more the country’s total nuclear generating capacity. But with this increased capacity comes increased spent nuclear fuel. The author writes that as the existing reactor-based storage pools fill up, spent fuel management is becoming a hot political issue. South Korea’s nuclear utility reports that over the next 10 years, the country will face a crisis in terms of on-site storage at all four of its nuclear power plant sites. As revealed in the nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plants in March 2011, the vulnerability of spent-fuel storage pools is a matter of serious concern. The author explores ways in which South Korea can move forward.

• deep borehole disposal
• dry cask storage
• geological repositories
• low and intermediate level waste repository
• NGOs
• nuclear power
• South Korea
• spent nuclear fuel

Acknowledgements

This article was prepared with support from the MacArthur Foundation.

Notes

Notes

1 Such a schedule will be examined by a multi-year joint study of spent fuel disposition options, as agreed by US and South Korean negotiators during discussions on the new civil nuclear cooperation agreement (State Department, 2010).

2 The dry storage in place before 2005 was installed as follows: 680 metric tons in 1990, 907 metric tons in 1998, and 680 metric tons in 2002.

Additional information

Author biography

Jungmin Kang is a member of the International Panel on Fissile Materials and is currently a visiting scholar at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, USA. He has held post-doctoral positions at Princeton and Stanford universities, where his research focus has been issues related to spent fuel management and reprocessing. His recent research interests include multinational approaches in uranium enrichment and spent fuel management, as well as verification and dismantlement of the North Korean nuclear weapons program.