By Kim Young-jin
Staff reporter
South Korea should not move to recycle its spent nuclear fuel as risks and costs associated with the process are too high, a lawmaker warned Thursday.
“There is growing criticism that reprocessing plants would pose a much greater safety risk than nuclear plants and involve astronomical costs,” Rep. Hong Hee-deok of the minor opposition Democratic Labor Party said, at a National Assembly conference on dealing with nuclear waste.
“It is a reckless path, unless a country wants to pursue nuclear arms,” he added.
The debate is heating up over what to do with the country’s spent fuel rods, for which storage, under the current scenario, is expected run out by 2016.
Seoul, backed by many scientists here, eventually wants to reprocess them -- despite being constrained by its nuclear cooperation agreement with the United States.
Under the accord, South Korea must get consent from the United States before reprocessing spent nuclear fuel. The deal was struck as a measure against the possible use of the material for military purposes.
The two countries are currently negotiating an extension of the agreement, which currently expires in 2014, with Seoul looking to regain the right to reprocess the spent fuel at its own will.
Korea, which won a landmark $20 billion contract in December to build four nuclear reactors in the United Arab Emirates, has long complained that the ban hinders its aspirations to become a top exporter of nuclear plants.
Washington fears that the reprocessing could undermine its global nonproliferation efforts and provoke North Korea, further ratcheting up tensions in Northeast Asia.
Seoul maintains that through a technology in development called pyroprocessing, the reuse of spent fuel rods could be carried out without generating plutonium, the primary component for nuclear bombs.
But Jang Jeong-wook, a professor at Matsuyama University in Japan, said the technique is far from ready for safe use.
“It is a common view among scientists that the development of the fast reactor used for the reprocessing will take at least 50 years before commercialization,” he said. “Furthermore, such reactors will be at constant risk of a major disaster due to a possible explosion of sodium.”
The United States and Korea are reportedly running a joint study on the validity of pyroprocessing. The allies are expected to hold talks on the nuclear deal after September.
Korea currently gleans some 40 percent of its electricity from the 20 nuclear power plants across the country.