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.

Keywords

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

One of the most rapidly growing developed countries in the world today, South Korea has used nuclear power significantly since 1978, when it started its first commercial nuclear power plant. And it continues to plan for its nuclear future. Twenty nuclear power reactors generated 145 terawatt hours, or 31.4 percent, of the country’s total electricity in 2010. By 2030, the government plans to have 19 more reactors online, bringing the country’s total nuclear generating capacity up to 42.7 gigawatts— compared to Japan’s 47.5 gigawatts of nuclear generating capacity today. But with this increased capacity comes increased spent nuclear fuel. Currently, South Korea’s pressurized water reactors annually discharge 300 metric tons of spent fuel, and its Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) heavy water reactors discharge 380 metric tons. It is estimated that approximately 51,000 metric tons of spent pressurized water reactor fuel and 20,000 metric tons of spent heavy water reactor fuel will be generated over the entire lifetimes of the 35 pressurized water reactors and 4 heavy water reactor units that are to be deployed by 2030.

As the existing reactor-based storage pools fill up, spent fuel management is becoming a hot political issue. Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP), 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. According to KHNP, the saturation dates for storage at the Kori, Ulchin, and Yonggwang sites for spent pressurized water reactor fuel, and at the Wolsong site for spent heavy water reactor fuel, will be 2016, 2018, 2021, and 2017, respectively (Park, 2008). The question now is how best to address this crisis. As vividly revealed in March 2011 during the nuclear disaster at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plants, the vulnerability of spent fuel storage pools to a loss-of-cooling accident is a matter of serious concern.

The politics involved

The Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), which is the government agency responsible for nuclear energy R&D in South Korea, has used the projected saturation crisis to bolster its argument in support of pyroprocessing, a type of reprocessing in which plutonium and other transuranics are electrochemically separated from uranium and fission products in spent fuel after its dissolution in molten salt. The institute has proposed a pyroprocessing-focused R&D program that included the development of fast neutron reactors. Arguing that with pyroprocessing, less spent fuel waste would need to be buried, KAERI reasons that the transuranics, after being separated and fabricated into fuel, can eventually be fissioned in the fast neutron reactors. Opponents argue, however, that commercialized fast reactors are unlikely to be deployed even by 2050 and that without such reactors, the separation of the transuranics has little merit for waste disposal; moreover, pyroprocessing, like standard PUREX (plutonium uranium extraction) reprocessing, raises serious proliferation concerns.

The debate is coming to a head because the current US-South Korean nuclear cooperation agreement is set to expire in 2014, and South Korea wants to negotiate a new deal that gives it the same rights to reprocess spent fuel that the United States extended to Japan in 1988. In that agreement, the United States gave Japan advance consent to reprocess its spent fuel. Currently, Japan is the only non-nuclear weapon state that reprocesses. But South Koreans feel that their nonproliferation record has been good and that their country has a mature nuclear power industry, which they believe was demonstrated in December 2009, when South Korea won a $40 billion contract to build four nuclear power plants in the United Arab Emirates.

So why shouldn’t South Korea have the same rights as Japan?

Pyroprocessing

If there is an understanding in the local communities that spent fuel will be recycled—that is, a pyroprocessing plant is in the pipeline—then the public would understand that storage of spent fuel would be temporary and would allow spent fuel storage near the site where the plant would be built, KAERI argues (Park et al., 2010). This is, in fact, the approach that Japan took (von Hippel, 2010). Whether or not a long-term commitment to pyroprocessing is essential to allow interim storage on site, a pyroprocessing capacity to handle spent fuel is several decades away. Therefore, it does not appear essential that there be any long-term commitment on pyroprocessing; however, R&D could be pursued with a relaxed schedule.¹

The right fit: Identifying storage

When it comes to short-term storage options, there are only two: South Korea must either opt for interim storage of spent fuel, or send the fuel to France for reprocessing—the approach that Japan took before it built its domestic reprocessing plant. But sending spent fuel to France would be much more costly, and the resulting high-level radioactive waste would be shipped back to South Korea for interim storage until a geological repository could be sited. Thus, in either case, interim storage would be required.

With regard to interim storage of spent fuel, the Korea Radioactive Waste Management Corporation (KRMC), which manages the country’s radioactive waste, says that on-site storage expansion could be accomplished by installing higher-capacity racks in spent fuel pools (that have not yet been re-racked) to maximum density, and by transferring older spent fuel from full reactor pools to the spent fuel pools of new reactors being constructed at the same sites (KRMC, 2010). At two of the pressurized water reactor sites, Kori and Ulchin, some of the new reactors are being built with new empty pools. This will offset the spent fuel storage crisis at these sites for an additional decade or more. No new reactors are planned at the third pressurized water reactor site, Yonggwang. Therefore, dry-cask storage will have to be deployed for older, cooler spent fuel at the Yonggwang site by 2020 and at the Kori and Ulchin sites in the next decade. In dry casks, the spent fuel assemblies are placed in sealed metal cylinders surrounded by concrete or other material and are passively air cooled, and effective radiation shielding is provided. Studies indicate that the integrity of the dry casks will be sustained for 100 years or more (Garwin, 2009).

Dry-cask storage

Dry-cask storage has already been built at Wolsong, the heavy water reactor site, and more is being built. Some argue that this storage is illegal because the same area already hosts South Korea’s low- and intermediate-level waste disposal facility which appears to conflict with a 2005 law that specifies that the local government that hosts the low- and intermediate-level facility will not be asked to host a central interim spent fuel storage facility as well. The KRMC argues, however, that the dry-cask storage facilities at Wolsong are for “temporary”—not “interim”—storage (KRMC, 2010). In fact, from 2005 to February 2010, the country’s nuclear utility expanded the dry storage capacity at Wolsong by 4,440 metric tons of heavy metal.² Because of the prodigious rate at which the heavy water reactors discharge spent fuel, this dry-cask storage will be full in 2017.

Thus, irrespective of the law, KHNP has built temporary on-site dry-cask storage as needed in order to keep its reactors operating.

Geological repositories

Whether or not it engages in pyroprocessing, South Korea will ultimately need a final repository to dispose of its spent fuel or high-level radioactive waste. However, KAERI claims that the tunnels of a spent fuel repository would underlie an unacceptably large area. It argues that the area could be reduced if: (1) spent fuel were pyroprocessed to separate the plutonium and other transuranics and then these isotopes were burnt in fast neutron reactors; and (2) the 30-year half-life cesium 137 and the 28-year half-life strontium 90 (which account for most of the radioactive heat from spent fuel during its first 50 years) were also separated from the spent fuel and stored on the surface or in a shallow, air conditioned repository for 200–300 years before being emplaced in a deep repository. The underground area also could be reduced by a factor of more than two if the spent fuel were cooled on the surface for 100 instead of 40 years before placing it in the repository (Wigeland, 2006).

Deep borehole disposal

An alternative to geological repositories that has recently received more attention due to its potential technical and cost advantages is deep borehole disposal. This would involve drilling into crystalline basement rocks to a depth of 3–5 kilometers (km), where any water is likely to be saline, then placing waste canisters in the bottom 1–2 km of the boreholes, and filling the upper kilometers of the borehole with impermeable material so that the wastes would be permanently isolated.

If long-term dry-cask storage were in place, there would be time to decide what ultimately to do with the spent fuel—deep borehole disposal is one possibility.

Financial incentives

It is hard to believe that local governments would be willing to shut down the nuclear power plants that they host. They have received substantial financial benefits from the government and KHNP per site: for example, in 2008, approximately $47 million for Kori, $45 million for Yonggwang, $45 million for Ulchin, and $29 million for Wolsong, based on legislation that was put in place in 1989, which was passed to facilitate power plant siting in South Korea. These host towns complain that the payments are used to pay for roads and infrastructure for communities. But the central government supports local governments in building roads and infrastructure whether or not they host nuclear power plants. The people living near nuclear power plants want to receive benefits beyond those already available to other communities.

Therefore the government or the utility should consider paying an extra “nuclear fuel storage tax” (Bunn et al., 2001) for dry storage, so the local communities can clearly see the extra benefit. A $10 million annual tax payment per site would add less than 1 percent to the cost of a nuclear kilowatt-hour.

In fact, the 2005 decision of the city of Gyeongju to host South Korea’s low- and intermediate-level waste disposal site shows the power of financial incentives. The central government offered a 300 billion won (about $270 million) up-front incentive, plus an additional 637,500 won (about $600) for each waste drum that was accepted until the site reached its design capacity of 800,000 drums. For the approximate 200,000 voters in Gyeongju, this eventually amounts to an initial $1,400 (then $2,400) per capita. The central government also offered to relocate KHNP’s headquarters to the city that hosted the waste facility, and, consequently, four cities competed to host the facility. Gyeongju won because 89.5 percent of its voters approved hosting the site, versus 67–84 percent of voters in the other candidate cities (Chung and Kim, 2009; Park et al., 2010). The vote in Gyeongju may be cynically explained by the fact that more than 90 percent of Gyeongju’s voters live on the other side of a mountain from the site. Of the remaining 10 percent who live within about 6 miles of the site, fewer than 60 percent voted affirmatively (Kim and Kim, 2010).

It is possible that the vote also was high because the waste facility is located next to the Wolsong nuclear power plant, and the population has become accustomed to living with a nuclear facility. In Finland and Sweden, the communities that have been willing to host national spent fuel repositories already host nuclear power plants. The same is true in Spain, where all of the communities that have volunteered to host the spent fuel repository already host operating or shut-down nuclear power plants.

South Korea has a history of failure, however, in siting a central interim spent fuel storage facility. It started in 1986, when the Atomic Energy Act was revised and the Ministry of Science and Technology (then known as MOST) and KAERI were assigned responsibility for radioactive waste management. Between 1986 and 1996, they made five attempts to acquire a single site for hosting both low- and intermediate-level waste disposal and central interim spent fuel storage facilities. All attempts failed, however, due to strong local resistance. In 1996, this series of failures resulted in MOST and KAERI ceding the responsibility for radioactive waste management to what is now known as the Ministry of Knowledge and Economy (MKE) and the Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO). In September 1998, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), South Korea’s highest policy-making body for nuclear power, announced a “Radioactive Waste Management Plan” in which a waste disposal facility would be built by 2008 and a nearby central interim spent fuel storage facility would be built by 2016. The plan required that spent fuel be stored on the reactor sites until 2016.

After four further failures, however, the commission decided in December 2004 to first pursue siting the waste disposal facility and then the central interim spent fuel storage facility (Cho and Whang, 2009; Kim, 2010). In March 2005, the central government promised that the local government that hosted the waste disposal facility would not be asked to also host a central interim spent fuel storage facility.

The main reasons, it seems, for the past siting failures were the government’s secret selection process in which it selected sites based on its own technological assessments and then gave up after encountering strong opposition (Cho and Whang, 2009). This is typical of the “Decide, Announce, Defend, and Abandon” (DADA) process that has failed in other countries, including the United Kingdom (Mackerron and Berkhout, 2009) and the United States. An approach that appears to have worked in other countries, such as Sweden and Finland, is a consultative process with local governments that includes a local veto, independent experts, and joint fact-finding.

If the South Korean government uses the same approach, including financial incentives, a local veto, consultation, and referendum, it might also be successful in siting interim spent fuel storage at a location that currently hosts a nuclear power plant.

Public support

In fall of 2010, I visited several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in the communities that host South Korea’s nuclear power plants. These NGOs work to educate the public on nuclear issues and to foster understanding between the nuclear industry, government, and the local population. During these visits, I found that many of the NGO members were open to considering an interim dry-cask spent fuel storage site—or even a final disposal site for some of them—in their areas (Private communications, 2010). This was after I explained to them why dry-cask storage is safer than pool storage.

Indeed, if freshly discharged fuel is densely packed in a spent fuel pool and the water were lost, the heated fuel could catch fire and release huge quantities of cesium 137, the principle radioactive isotope released by the Chernobyl accident that caused the evacuation of more than 1,000 square kilometers around that plant. This disastrous scenario is why some of my colleagues and I advocate, as an alternative to densely packing spent fuel cooling pools, taking the fuel out of the pools after five years and storing it in dry casks (Alvarez et al., 2003). The reinforced concrete around the casks also provides robust protection against physical damage, and the casks are expected to maintain their integrity for many decades. Interim storage in dry casks is easily accommodated even at small reactor sites, like those in Germany, because it does not take up much space.

Apart from the Wolsong site, the local NGOs in South Korea had never been told about dry-cask storage of spent fuel, although doing so is standard practice at reactors in the United States, Germany, and many other countries. The NGO members asked me: “If the dry casks are better for older fuel, why has KHNP not told us about them?”

From these discussions, I also learned that the local organizations did not trust KHNP and wanted briefings from independent experts. They said that if the safety of dry-cask storage is determined by independent experts, and if the local sites are properly compensated financially, then they would be open to adding such storage at the nuclear power plants. Half of these organizations, however, opposed accepting spent fuel from other sites. This means that finding a site for a central interim spent fuel storage facility would still be difficult. Furthermore, considering the high costs of transportation and potential social tension from communities along the spent fuel transportation routes, siting for a central interim spent fuel storage facility would not be an easy option. The local NGOs also emphasized the importance of openness and transparency in the process.

Conclusion

The South Korean public deserves to have information imparted on nuclear energy issues in a process that they can trust—and, in fact, South Korea’s government once took initiative in that direction. In April 2007, having acquired a site for its low- and intermediate-level waste repository, a subcommittee of the National Energy Commission, which was chaired by South Korea’s president, established a task force to design a process to achieve public consensus on spent fuel management. Based on the task force’s report, in July 2009 the MKE established a committee to manage the process. A month later, however, the process was halted, and the ministry announced that a legal framework and a solicitation of expert opinion were required first. An expert group composed of members of South Korea’s nuclear establishment was instructed to carry out a year-long research project in 2010 as a basis for the public consensus process.

As indicated earlier, public consultation along with input from independent experts and a joint fact-finding mission will be critical to the process for building dry-cask interim storage and a final disposal site. In the absence of independent experts being available to the public and local governments, consultation becomes a sham. The central government should design the public consultation process—at least with regard to making available or giving local governments funds to recruit independent experts. One recent study proposed designing a public consensus process in which a public consensus committee, working groups, and discussion groups would be set up independently from the utility and government; local communities would participate in seminars, workshops, and hearings to facilitate public education (Whang et al., 2009).

Whether the public consensus process will in fact be finally launched remains to be seen. If it is to be credible, however, the process must be open, transparent, and involve local communities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This article was prepared with support from the MacArthur Foundation.

Notes

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.

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