Korea Seeking to Reprocess Spent Nuclear Fuel
An international atomic energy conference held in Seoul last week provided an opportunity for South Korea to reaffirm its firm stance on its nonproliferation and peaceful use of nuclear power. It also served as a forum for the nation to express its willingness to adopt an advanced method to help solve its nuclear waste problem.
In an opening speech to the Summit of Honor on Atoms for Peace and Environment (SHAPE) on Thursday, Prime Minister Chung Un-chan said that South Korea plans to develop a complete structure of a nuclear fuel cycle in order to recycle spent fuel and dramatically reduce high-grade nuclear waste. His remarks indicate that the nation needs to acquire technology to reprocess nuclear waste.
The new technology is known as ``pyroprocessing," a novel method of waste processing that could address worries about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. South Korea has been conducting research on this method designed to reprocess spent fuel without extracting weapons-grade plutonium from it. The country is now seen as a pioneer in the study of the method. If it succeeds in developing and commercializing the technology, the nation may reduce its high-grade nuclear waste to one-20th of the current level.
What an innovative method it is! There is little doubt that the technology will not only help tackle the nuclear proliferation problem but also solve the headache of accumulating nuclear waste. However, the country still has a stumbling block to pyroprocessing ― the Korea-U.S. nuclear energy agreement that bans any types of spent fuel reprocessing. The bilateral pact was signed in 1972 and is to expire in March 2014. Thus it is necessary to revise the accord to allow the Asian country to use the pyroprocessing method.
Seoul officials are expected to start negotiations with U.S. policymakers in the latter half of the year to rewrite the agreement. We hope the U.S. side will positively act on this issue, taking into account Korea's growing difficulties in managing its nuclear waste. Korea has already accumulated over 10,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel. It now operates 20 nuclear power plants that churn out 700 tons of spent fuel every year. So, it will exhaust its total storage capacity of spent fuel by 2016.
More worrisome is that the government plans to build 18 more plants by 2030 to cover 59 percent of the nation's total electricity supply. The treatment of nuclear waste is feared to pose a grave challenge to the nation as residents are strongly against any plans to set up additional storage sites for spent fuel. Past experiences show that it is really hard to find any proper storage locations due to the ``not-in-my-backyard" mentality among people.
Korea also urgently needs pyroprocessing in order to emerge as the world's leader in nuclear power generation. In December, a consortium led by the state-run Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) won a $20-billion deal to build four nuclear plants in the United Arab Emirates. Korea is also trying to strike similar deals with Turkey and other countries. Therefore, it is required to get the rights to spent fuel reprocessing for the peaceful exploitation of nuclear energy.
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