![]() ![]() That South Korean city is host to a repository for the disposal of low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste and is close to other host cities for nuclear power plants such as Ulsan and Busan. South Korean citizens’ anxieties about nuclear safety have certainly increased over the past years, especially after the 2011 accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, which included nuclear core meltdowns caused by the unprecedented earthquake and tsunami, and the 2015 earthquake in Gyeongju. During his presidential campaign, Moon pledged to phase out nuclear energy due to growing public concerns about safety of the country’s nuclear facilities. ![]() The Moon Jae-in administration’s stance on nuclear issues seems to be ambivalent and confusing not only to its domestic electorate but also to its international audience. The article concludes that South Korea faces nuclear policy dilemmas and that the current policy incoherence could worsen in the future because of contentious internal dynamics. This article describes the country’s current nuclear capacity, reviews the history of spent fuel management in South Korea, discusses differing views of nuclear elites and the Korean public on the nuclear phaseout and back-end fuel cycle policies, and explains how these paradoxes in current nuclear policies have emerged. Second, South Korea is continuing its research on pyroprocessing – which can be controversial especially from a nonproliferation perspective – for its future spent fuel management while at the same time pursuing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. First, although the Moon Jae-in administration is adhering to its nuclear phaseout policy, the country’s nuclear capacity is likely to grow during his term. Meanwhile, South Korea’s current nuclear policies look paradoxical, mainly in two ways. The world is now watching a series of historic negotiations in which the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is to be discussed. Since the beginning of 2018, the nuclear dynamics surrounding the Korean Peninsula have started to change rapidly and dramatically. ![]()
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March 2023
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