Reconstructing the public in old and new governance: A Korean case of nuclear energy policy

Public engagement and a “new” mood for dialogue

Korean nuclear energy regulatory policies are noted to have gradually changed from earlier exclusive technocracy into open dialogues and public participation. In nuclear governance related to facility siting, the Korean government began to incorporate more dialogues and participatory processes after several violent anti-nuclear movements in the 1990s (Lim and Tang, 2002). This paper is an attempt to analyze new Korean nuclear regulatory policies with their increasing practices of public engagement since approximately 2005 as a blend of old and new governance.

The practice of engaging the public in decision-making processes has become popular internationally. It has arisen primarily as a means to ameliorate the public mistrust that has undermined science and technology development plans (Hagendijk and Irwin, 2006; Stilgoe, Irwin and Jones, 2006). Public Understanding of Science (PUS) literatures have extensively discussed the importance of understanding the public’s rationality in risk governance, rather than educating the public about their deficit of scientific knowledge (Irwin and Wynne, 1996; Irwin, 2001; Jasanoff, 2003). For example, public concerns over nuclear waste are not removed simply by providing scientific information about health risks; they include wider dimensions such as loss of trust in regulatory agencies, feelings of powerlessness and experiences of alienation from decision-making. In an attempt to regain public trust in science, the exercise of involving the public is increasingly institutionalized as part of science and technology policies (Rowe and Frewer, 2005; Sclove, 2010).

Yet PUS literatures have also expressed some hesitation and doubts about how new forms of governance actually turned out in practice—they were more partial, attenuated or superficial than “new” (Irwin, 2006; Wynne, 2006). As Irwin (2006: 316) discussed with an example of the GM Nation? exercise, new modes of public dialogues are followed by “discursive struggles” over “what counts as legitimate talk” and often in such struggles, certain assumptions of science, society and their relations are expressed.

As in European risk governance, a shift towards dialogue and transparency was partial and limited in Korean nuclear governance. The primary goal of this paper, however, is not to decide whether new nuclear governance overall was deliberative or not by reviewing the full extent of Korean nuclear policies after the 2000s. Rather, it describes and analyzes how old assumptions of the Korean local and general public have been reproduced through increasing practices of public engagement. In doing so, this paper aims to provide an empirical account of how seemingly new forms of science and technology policies emphasize openness and inclusiveness only to reproduce socio-cultural boundaries among groups of the public and bring about new problems.

Materials and methods

The first section in the main body reviews previous literatures on Korean nuclear energy and the results of annual surveys from 1993 to 2010 by the Korea Nuclear Energy Foundation (KNEF, a government organization for public information on nuclear energy). The purpose of revisiting the survey results is not to validate the Korean public’s genuine support for nuclear energy, as we cannot overrule the possibility that the survey results were artifacts of leading questions. Rather, surveys are presented as practices around which the assumption of the Korean general public’s being in support of nuclear power is socially constructed. The second section discusses a local referendum to decide on a nuclear waste repository site in 2005 as the starting point of new participatory nuclear governance. A news editorial and an official remark of a KNEF senior researcher on the referendum are analyzed along with previous Korean sociological literatures. The primary and secondary materials in the first two sections illustrate that the Korean government and major newspapers with a pro-nuclear stance have constructed the local public as an isolated group from the general public. The third section contains data obtained through interviews carried out between October and November in 2011 in and near a local region, Kori. The Kori nuclear power plant site has five nuclear reactors in operation and three under construction. The oldest reactor, Kori-1, has been at the center of public debates since the Fukushima incident in March 2011. One environmental activist, a lawyer leading a lawsuit against Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, two local residents and one local council member were interviewed. Interviewees were asked about their experiences with and opinions on increasing demands for transparent nuclear governance. The fourth section discusses selected interviews from Korean newspaper coverage of the accident at the Kori plant in February 2012. The materials were selected to analyze multiple perspectives on the arguably increasing institutional transparency and who are the “public” that are in public engagement with Korean nuclear governance.

Historical background

Currently in Korea, 23 nuclear reactors are in operation with 5 more reactors under construction and 4 more reactors to be added according to plans (see Figure 1). The National Basic Energy Plan announced by the government in 2008 includes programs for increasing nuclear energy to 59 percent of Korean electricity production by 2030, building 12 more nuclear units by 2022 and exporting 80 nuclear units by 2030. ¹ The Nu-Tech 2030 plan announced on November 23, 2011 by the Korean Ministry of Knowledge Economy (MKE) included similar proposals to export Korea’s indigenous nuclear reactor while making Korea one of the world’s top three nuclear energy technology countries along with the US and France. Although this plan was announced after the Fukushima incident, it nonetheless contains much technological optimism for Korean nuclear energy.

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Figure 1.

A map of the locations of nuclear power plants (21 in operation and 7 under construction) in Korea showing that nuclear-related facilities were sited in remote regions far from Seoul. Currently in October 2013, there are 23 power plants in operation and 5 under construction without changes in locations.

The general public’s support for nuclear energy has been assumed and discursively constructed since the early days of Korean nuclear technology. Jasanoff and Kim (2009) discuss that nuclear energy in Korea has been collectively interpreted as something necessary to build up the nation as a modern and economically developed country since its liberation from Japanese colonialism after the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The history of Korean nuclear energy is a history of technical and economic development. In 1967, the Korean government made a plan to construct three nuclear reactors of 600,000 kW. At that time, overall Korean energy consumption was only about 1,000,000 kW. The government expected nuclear power to provide the majority of the energy needed for the Korean economy. With such an expectation, the country’s first commercial nuclear power units, the Kori-1 began operating in 1978. The Wolsong-1 and Kori-2 reactors came on line in 1983. These units were all purchased from Westinghouse by the government-owned company Korea Electric (currently Korea Electric Power Corporation, KEPCO).

With the increases in nuclear power plants, the government set the goal of building reactors of indigenous technology (M.-J. Kim, 2011). In 1987, KEPCO began constructing the Youngkwang-3 and -4 as Korean standard nuclear power plants. The US firm Combustion Engineering won the contract by agreeing to a full technology transfer. Since the late 1980s, the nuclear plants in South Korea have been built by using 95% or more indigenous technology. By 1989, nine nuclear units were in operation, providing more than 45 percent of Korean energy consumption. In 2009, KEPCO made a $20 billion contract to export a reactor to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), making Korea the sixth nuclear plant exporting country in the world following the US, France, Japan, Russia and Canada.

Three Mile Island in 1979 and the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 did not lead to massive anti-nuclear activities in Korea, partly because the two incidents occurred before the democratization of the Korean military regime in 1987. Yet even after the democratization, the Korean government continued its decide-announce-defend (DAD) approach in nuclear policies. In accordance with the continued old governance, surveys worked as a method to discursively construct the general public as supporters of nuclear energy for national economic growth. In a 1996 survey by KNEF, 81 percent of Koreans answered they were for the further increase in nuclear energy production and 85 percent responded that nuclear power was necessary in Korea. In a 2010 survey done after KEPCO’s contract with the UAE, when the expectation that Korea is set to become a major country for the exporting of nuclear technology was widely reported by national media, 88 percent answered that nuclear power was necessary and 61 percent were for additional construction. KNEF was not the only institute that presented the Korean general public as pro-nuclear. In a 2005 survey commissioned by the International Atomic Energy Agency, Korea was listed as the country with the highest support for nuclear power among the 18 countries examined (including the US, the UK, France, Japan and Canada).

While the majority of the national public was shown to accept the necessity of nuclear power in such surveys, the old DAD approach in Korea met several serious conflicts in local regions. In November 1990, the Korean government announced a plan to construct a nuclear waste repository in a small island, Anmyeon, which has approximately 17,000 residents. Activists and residents organized a massive rally with about 20,000 participants, which led the government to cancel the Anmyeon plan in 1993. Similar conflicts around the siting of nuclear power plants and/or repository facilities were repeated in Guleop Island in 1994, Uljin in 1994 and Wi Island in 2003. ² In all four cases, the government withdrew its construction plans partly because of violent conflicts and partly because new research highlighted the regions’ geographical inadequacy as a nuclear waste repository site. Yet none of the local movements were connected to social accounts of the Korean general public’s opposition to nuclear energy.

Rather, the interpretation of the general Korean public as being in support of nuclear energy was continuously reproduced during the time of local conflicts. In the 1996 KNEF survey, after the protests in Uljin, Anmyeon and Guleop Island, 85 percent of respondents from across the nation thought nuclear power was necessary and 66 percent agreed with the construction of even more plants in Korea. The survey was not the only discursive practice to construct the difference between the Korean general public and the local population. P.-L. Lee (1999), a well-known anti-nuclear scholar-activist, pointed out that the majority of the Korean general public support nuclear energy because they regard it as indispensable, even though they do not consider it as safe. According to Lee, the high support for nuclear energy with remaining safety concerns seems to result from the public (mis)understanding that dangerous nuclear radioactivity coming from a nuclear waste repository or a nuclear power plant can be contained in a small region such as Anmyeon Island. The government’s selection of small islands and remote towns as candidate sites for nuclear facilities fits with such perceived separation between the general public and the local population. Conflicts surrounding nuclear-related facilities were interpreted as local NIMBY phenomena, which contrast the general public’s support for the nation’s nuclear-centered energy policy (Park, 1992; Valentine and Sovacool, 2010). The majority of the public’s understanding of nuclear as “necessary” and the representation of the local anti-nuclear movements as “irrational” was similarly noted in Taiwan (Fan, 2009). Yet unlike the local tribe in Taiwan, residents in Anmyeon Island or Uljin are not ethnically distinct from other Koreans. Nonetheless, the separation between the local and the general public in Korea has been discursively and socially constructed.

In the following sections, this paper will illustrate how the separation between the local and the general public has been reconstructed during the developmental course of Korean nuclear energy. While the old technocratic nuclear policy crisscrossed and coexisted with new participatory governance before and after the Fukushima incident, the difference between the local and the general public was socially reproduced.

The Kyungju local referendum

After failed attempts to construct a nuclear waste repository in the 1990s, the Korean government used the new approach of moving away from DAD towards new participatory governance. ³ A local referendum introduced in 2005 by the government has received particular media attention. The government announced four candidate sites and operated local referendums as a decisive step in selecting nuclear waste repository siting. Following the Special Act on Assistance to the Locations of Facilities for the Disposal of Low and Intermediate Level Radioactive Wastes established in 2005, the region with the highest approval rate was to receive around 300 million US dollars plus operating costs and to recruit a science project with a high power proton accelerator and the KNEF headquarters along with the repository facility. The coastal city of Kyungju was selected with an approval rate of 89.5%.

Several activists and critical academics regard the Kyungju referendum as a failure in participatory governance, which worsened social conflicts and reproduced the Korean public’s support of nuclear power for economic reasons. Cha and Min (2006) criticized the referendum for its lack of deliberative processes. Yoon (2005) critically evaluated that the seemingly participatory practice failed to invite the rationality of the public, as the discussion on siting was taken over by local selfishness over compensation, in other words, the PIMFY (please in my front yard) phenomenon. H.-M. Lee (2006) suggested that the referendum might have been tarnished by the local governments’ illegal activities, as the competition for compensation heated up between Kyungju and three other candidate regions. According to Lee, the 20~30% rate of abstention in voting in all the regions, which is much higher than the usual rate of below 3 percent in Korean elections, looks quite suspicious. Even if we put aside the question of whether the local governments really committed any illegal activities, it seems enough to say the referendum and local forums included in site selection processes were followed by debates over what participation really means (or should mean) in risk governance. The government made the decision to build a nuclear waste disposal facility in order to continue its heavy reliance on nuclear energy; in this context, the local referendum added as a discrete step to incorporate public engagement was regarded to be unsatisfactorily deliberative. As Irwin (2008: 199) noted, “social experiments in ‘public engagement’ very often lead to accusations that the exercise was too restricted, too short and insufficiently democratic.” The participatory turn in Korean nuclear governance was no exception.

What is particular about (partially) participatory governance in Korea, however, is its continued connection to the presumed separation between the local and the general public. Chosun Ilbo, the leading national daily in Korea known for its conservative orientation, published an editorial column about the 2005 referendum:

Nuclear waste repository siting used to be a symbol of social conflict in Korea for the past twenty years. […] In the case of Wi Island in 2003, mob violence continued for two months turning the Buan County into a battleground for two months. Things have changed greatly in two years. New attempts to overcome local selfishness are worth examining. Before, questions around economic compensation and procedural legitimacy intensified NIMBY. New policies removed suspicion. First, the Special Act on Assistance to the Locations of Facilities for the Disposal of Low and Intermediate Level Radioactive Wastes established in March 2005 stipulated the special subsidy of $300 million and the waste fee of $8.5 million per year. Second, the Act stipulated that local decision-making processes need to be transparent and democratic. The head of local government [in Kyungju] organized resident forums and surveys before submitting a proposal for recruitment. Transparency and participation removed conflicts. (September 12, 2005, Chosun Ilbo, emphasis added)

The editorial illustrates the context in which the 2005 referendum was designed as a competition between local candidates rather than as the national referendum to consult the public about nuclear waste management or energy policies in general. In the editorial, the new transparent and participatory governance is understood as a means to lessen the old NIMBY phenomenon by openly promising economic compensation to the local public.

The referendum and resident forums were contextualized within the continued assumption that the local NIMBY is the source of social conflicts around nuclear energy. The general public, who were assumed to support nuclear power without conflicts, were not invited to a referendum. Concurrently, in the 2005 KNEF survey, 95 percent of respondents answered that nuclear power is necessary.

In the symposium on the export of Korean nuclear power plants and the new growth engine held in the national assembly in 2011, Chung Ik-cheol, a senior researcher at KNEF said, “the majority of the public acknowledge the importance, necessity and security of nuclear energy; the local acceptance, however, is a different problem as the statistics show.” He went on to note the new governance after the Kyungju referendum as “a scientific and advanced system to achieve social acceptance of nuclear energy” (January 3, 2011, DP News). Before 2005, the boundary was between the supportive public and local NIMBY protesters. After 2005, the boundary was redrawn between the general public who were not invited to the referendum and locals who were invited and compensated. While the majority of the public is assumed to be in support of nuclear technology, participatory governance such as a referendum is regarded as a means to pander to local residents in specific. Through practices and discourses that support participatory governance, the local population is continuously represented as a group distinct from the general public.

The Kori site after the Fukushima incident

The Fukushima incident of March 2011 was an important turning point in the Korean anti-nuclear movement. Korean public understanding of radioactivity as being containable in a small region seemed to change. A new assumption, that a wide range of people who would not be socially considered as local residents near nuclear power plants can become anti-nuclear, was shared and expressed. Kim Hye-jeong in the Korea Federation for the Environmental Movement (KFEM), one of the oldest and largest Korean environmental organizations said, the “Korean anti-nuclear movement before the Fukushima incident was centered on local residents and environmental organizations. After the incident, anti-nuclear movements have expanded to more diverse classes” (April 30, 2013, Talhaek News). It was widely reported by the Korean media that the Japanese government initially created an exclusion zone with a radius of 3 km which eventually expanded to 30 km. One nuclear power plant in Kori received social attention particularly from anti-nuclear organizations after the incident; a radius of 30 km from the plant includes more than 4 million residents and two highly urbanized regions—Busan, Korea’s second largest city and Ulsan. ⁴

A heightened sense of insecurity was followed by increased social demands for transparency in Korean nuclear governance. In April 2011, the Busan Bar Association filed a court injunction to have Kori-1, Korea’s oldest nuclear reactor at the Kori nuclear power plant taken out of operation. Kori-1 began operation in 1978 and was supposed to complete its lifespan in 2007. Yet it was given a 10-year extension in 2008 after the International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspection. Kang Dong-gyu, chairman of the association’s special committee on the environment, said in an interview:

I didn’t have much interest in nuclear power plants before. After the Fukushima incident, I learned that a wide area can be influenced by such accidents. When KHNP [Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power] decided to extend the operation of Kori-1, it did not disclose the results of the safety assessment. I filed the court injunction not because I am against nuclear energy or because I demand that the whole Kori site should be shut down. I make a rational demand to stop the Kori-1 reactor temporarily, check its safety and operate it again after examination. Some people raise questions about 35-year-old Kori-1’s safety yet little information is accessible. Even if Korea continues to operate nuclear power plants, it is necessary to publicly discuss the issue of Kori-1’s safety at least once after the Fukushima incident. (interview, November, 2011)

The association’s demand for transparency in nuclear governance in the name of the public was echoed by other civil organizations. Energy Justice Action is a national-level environmental association that has led protests against the extended operation of Kori-1 since 2007. Chairman Lee Heon-seok spoke in the interview: “In principle, we want to live in a safe society without nuclear energy; we are against nuclear power itself of any kind—be it transparently regulated or not.” Still, Lee employs transparency as an important topic in the movement because “people are interested in accidents and safety issues; safety and transparency go together; you cannot have one without the other.” In an official public statement issued in May 2012, Lee wrote: “People are astounded by the exclusiveness of nuclear industries and the government. As all the citizens of the nation (mo-deun kuk-min) are already aware, transparency is as important as nuclear safety. A safety assessment conducted in a transparent way will increase not only the level of trust but also of safety.” In Lee’s statement, inclusiveness was not framed as an add-on process for and by local residents before the siting of nuclear facilities. After the Fukushima incident, transparent governance was framed by civil organizations as a concern of the general public; and the general public was assumed to be somewhat against or at least suspicious about nuclear energy and its risk governance. According to a poll conducted by the global marketing research company Ipsos in June 2011, 61% of the respondents were somewhat or strongly opposed to nuclear energy. ⁵

Not surprisingly, earlier governmental attempts to add more openness and inclusiveness through the local referendum and resident forums were criticized by Korean civil organizations as being inadequate. Kang noted that although the Korean government rhetorically supported openness, the KHNP’s practices revealed how authoritarian Korean nuclear governance really was. Recalling how he began the suit, Kang mentioned:

I was reckless to file the injunction. Some nuclear-related information is legally required to be accessible but we could not obtain much information for the suit. The KHNP Kori site gave a limited time and place for the accessible information. For example, they gave 30 minutes to read the safety assessment report of Kori-1 in a courtroom. We are not experts in nuclear technology. How are we supposed to understand [the possible problems]?

Lee also perceives that the seemingly new nuclear policy towards more openness since the 2005 Kyungju referendum is a cover-up.

Energy Justice Action have, in 2007, 2008 and 2009, continuously demanded that three documents should be accessible to the public—a periodic safety review, a lifetime evaluation report and an environmental impact assessment report, which the KHNP is required to submit to the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST). After Fukushima, the reports were finally disclosed but how? The KHNP told us to come to their office [at the Kori site] without cameras or pencils and to just read. The reports were this thick. So we held a press conference and stated this was nonsense. It is meaningless. This is what the Korean government calls transparency.

The safety assessment report for the Kori plant is 5,440 pages long. The KHNP Kori site has disclosed the report since May 2011 in response to the public’s safety concerns over the 35-year-old Kori-1 reactor. However, KHNP limited the time and place to read the report on the grounds that it contains design plans and information related to intellectual property. In September 2011, the Busan court rejected the injunction, while the appeal is currently ongoing.

Criticism of governments’ continued authoritarian scientific governance combined with superficial exercises of engagement or openness is not uncommon and in PUS literatures has called for a more nuanced discussion of democracy and technocracy’s forming of an uneasy coexistence (Irwin, 2006). Yet what is distinct about a blend of old and new nuclear governance in Korea is how the old constructed divide between national and local manages to be reconstructed within the changing environment of more widely supported anti-nuclear sentiments and increasing emphasis on openness. Unexpectedly, after the Fukushima incident local residents near Kori-1 separated themselves from national-level civil organizations by not participating in an anti-nuclear movement which phrased safety and transparency as a national concern. The Busan Bar Association could recruit 97 plaintiffs for the injunction filed in April 2011, which is not a small number given that public interest lawsuits are uncommon in Korea. However, local residents remained indifferent. Kang recalls that “only two or three among them were local residents living near the Kori plant.” In the same month, 60 city and district council members in Busan made a public announcement to demand that the government shut down Kori-1 and stop making Busan into a nuclear complex. No council members from Kijang, the county where the Kori plant is located, joined the announcement.

Park H., a council worker of Kijang County, also serves as a vice-chancellor in a private supervisory organization which demands more open dialogues between local residents and KHNP. However, he was adamant that local problems are different from the safety or transparency concerns raised by people living in the nearby city and national-level civil organizations.

We [members of the Kijang County council] did not join the announcement because we represent the local population. People in Busan suddenly became anxious about Kori-1 after the Fukushima incident. We are not like them. We are calm and aware of real problems. We have lived with this issue for a long time. (interview, November 2011)

The “real” problem Park sees as the most important includes complicated issues partly related to economic compensation for people living in Gilcheon and Wolnae villages located within 5 km of the plant. Park K., Gilchoen, the village headman, seemed upset when asked about the local residents’ stance on social movements that are demanding more transparency:

We did not join street protests [after the Fukushima incident]. We know about safety, transparency or social acceptability issues. Of course I do not trust what KHNP says about safe nuclear energy. But more imminently, we are living with the plant. The local economy is terrible because the government sets limits on construction near the plant in case of a meltdown. Look at this town and Busan with its urban glitters. I know young people like you would not even want to visit this town. The fishing community has declined, I think, to 20% compared to 30 years ago. We are dying of hunger. Nuclear safety? We have no time to think of that. As people outside talk more about safety, discussion over the local economy becomes neglected. Of course I do not trust what KHNP says about safety. Yet, if we talked about problems with nuclear energy, more people would stop buying our fish. So we stay silent. We are totally different from Busan citizens. (interview, November 2011)

Seo Y., a local resident whose family has lived in Wolnae village for six generations agrees with Park:

So many people moved out because of the worsening local economy. They think we receive massive economic compensation from KHNP. ⁶ But most of it is used for construction—roads, sports complexes and so forth. Local residents cannot decide where to spend the money. It would be really good if people in this village could pay, say, TV and Internet costs of about $30 per month out of it. But we cannot. People in big cities like Seoul and Busan pay attention to the safety of Kori-1 after the Fukushima incident. But they know nothing about local situations. We are not their concern. (interview, November 2011)

The uneasy silence of people who identify themselves as local residents near the Kori-1 reactor hides a mixture of complex feelings including their lack of trust in nuclear institutes (“Of course I do not trust what KHNP says about safety”), a sense of powerlessness after decades of living near the plants and not being able to control where to spend the received compensation, concerns about their town being stigmatized by increased anxieties over nuclear safety after the Fukushima incident and frustration over their alienation from the nation’s economic growth. Local residents’ indifference to post-Fukushima anti-nuclear movements needs to be seen not as the expression of their pro-nuclear attitudes but as their deep-rooted sense of being separated as others in Korea.

While recalling the absence of local residents from near the Kori site in the citizen plaintiffs, Kang said, “After the Fukushima incidents, social demands for open discussion about nuclear safety are increasing. Surely, the locals care more about compensation. I understand their pain but this particular lawsuit cannot be about that.” One leading member of Energy Justice Action said: “It is the bitter but inevitable truth. I admit our goals and those of local residents are different. We cannot join a discussion over those [economic] kinds of problems. When some local residents in anti-nuclear movements want to divert us to economic [compensation] issues, we just quit. I think that’s the right way” (interview, November 2011).

Although some civil organizations’ orientation is far from that of the Korean government and nuclear-friendly media, they also unintentionally reproduce the constructed divide between the local and the general public including Busan citizens. The KNEF surveys in the 1990s constructed the local–national boundary by featuring the local population as NIMBY protesters; and the referendum in 2005 was based upon the assumption that given the general public’s support, only locals needed to be persuaded in order for the government to continue its nuclear-dependent energy policy. After the Fukushima incident it seemed that civil organizations from anti-nuclear backgrounds repeatedly constructed the divide by framing institutional transparency and accountability as a national, not a local issue in their movements.

The post-Fukushima separation of the local and the general public is contextualized within the historically constructed memory of nuclear energy as the national issue. Even after the nation’s political democratization and the burgeoning of environmental movements against blind-sighted economic development, the Korean media did not pay much attention to local voices. Y.-K. Kim’s (2003) study reveals that between 1987 and 2002, Chosun Ilbo and Joongang Ilbo, the two most-read Korean dailies published one article about local residents’ rights for economic survival along with 39 articles about technical safety measures and 53 about the international movement of radioactive waste. Hankoyreh, the only national daily with a progressive and anti-nuclear editorial orientation, published two articles about local residents’ rights with 18 articles about accidents in power plants and 55 about the problems of secretive nuclear policies.

Kim’s analysis showed that both anti- and pro-nuclear newspapers employed political and environmental frames to support their views. For instance, the lack of transparent nuclear governance in Korea was framed either as a call for a national transition to a sustainable energy plan or as a reason for improving regulatory systems, while maintaining the current energy plan centered on low carbon emitting nuclear energy. Notably, it was economic frames that were almost exclusively used by pro-nuclear newspapers to emphasize the necessity of nuclear energy for national economic growth. Only occasionally did progressive newspapers cover economic arguments that nuclear energy is not cheap considering the costs for waste management and compensation; yet, according to Kim, such arguments were presented briefly without substantial backup material. Kim’s analysis suggests that the lack of local voices in major Korean newspapers is not due to the absence of media critique against nuclear energy and its social implications. Rather, it is due to the major dailies’ selection of issues that can appeal to the general public rather than the local population. It was not just the government and the conservative press that marginalized local residents’ rights for economic survival as a less important issue than economic growth. The progressive media regarded the coverage of local residents’ economic concerns as a less effective strategy to support anti-nuclear arguments than the public appeal to the more democratic and environmentally-friendly nation. In both pro- and anti-nuclear media discourse, the nation came first.

The general public who were expected to support the national economic growth under the authoritarian regime are expected to demand more transparent and participatory nuclear policies after the Fukushima incident. Local residents’ economic survival was hardly featured at all by conservative and progressive newspapers between 1987 and 2002. It was their problem which was not covered by the national media. The silence of local residents near the Kori-1 reactor is becoming their problem which conflicts with the public demands of openness and participation.

The Kori-1 blackout scandal

After the Fukushima incident, the Korean government created an institutional transformation for new nuclear governance. In October 2011, the Korean government launched the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission (NSSC). It is the new independent regulator with a chairman of ministerial rank who reports directly to the president. The NSSC regulates licensing, inspection, enforcement, emergency response, non-proliferation, export/import control and physical protection. The former regulator, the Korean Institute of Nuclear Safety (KINS) became a technical support organization under the NSSC. Because KINS was formerly under the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology and in charge of promoting nuclear power, the establishment of the NSSC is considered as a sign of increasing regulatory independence in Korean nuclear safety regulation. The NSSC is also independent from the Ministry of Knowledge Economy, which controls KHNP and is responsible for the construction and operation of nuclear power plants, nuclear fuel supply and radioactive waste management.

Choi Kwang-sik, a researcher at KINS contributed two editorials on transparent and participatory governance to the institutional newsletter in 2007 and 2009. In an interview, Choi emphasized the importance of regulatory independence in new nuclear governance:

There is little discussion about this [new governance] at KINS. I am personally interested in this as an academic topic. Although more people will demand transparent regulation, KINS will not become more transparent unless the government strongly drives it. The launch of the NSSC is a good attempt towards the new nuclear governance of safety and transparency. (interview, October 2011)

However, the government-initiated drive towards new nuclear governance for public trust faced serious doubts raised by the media and activists in 2012. Environmental activists expressed strong criticism against the NSSC. Kim Hye-jeong of the KFEM said, “Although the NSSC was launched to toughen safety regulations, it is only giving indulgences to nuclear industries. It is working for the nuclear mafia and their job security” (September 6, 2011, Pressian).

On March 13, 2012, the NSSC temporarily shut down the Kori-1 reactor after an accident on February 9, 2012 was noted by KHNP. During maintenance a worker broke the power connection and caused a 12-minute blackout at the reactor. A failure of the backup generator resulted in a suspension of the cooling water system, which could cause a meltdown. The problem is that for more than a month the NSSC had no knowledge of the incident as the manager of the reactor concealed the situation after the recovery. The news got out when a local council member accidentally overheard something about the blackout and called the plant to check the “rumor.” A search with the keywords “blackout in Kori” in the Korean Integrated News Database System (KINDS), a Korean equivalent of LexisNexis, highlighted 320 news articles and 35 editorials in major national dailies. The head of KHNP resigned in April and the manager was imprisoned in July 2012.

The Kori-1 blackout scandal put not only the safety of the nation’s oldest reactor, but also the reliability of the NSSC as a regulatory organization under serious question. The NSSC was first criticized for failing to monitor KHNP. Four NSSC officials dispatched at the Kori site did not know about the blackout. Then on July 4, 2012, the NSSC approved the resuming of the Kori-1 operation, which met opposition in Busan, a city near Kori. A survey on July 5, 2012 in Busan shows that 66.9% of the respondents were for shutting down Kori-1, a much higher percentage than 42.8% from the same survey conducted in May 2012. In the July 2012 survey, 65.9% of the respondents expressed that they cannot trust the NSSC’s announcement about the safety of Kori-1.

The government tried to mitigate the situation through public dialogue. The Minister of Knowledge Economy, Hong Seok-woo visited the Kori site after the NSSC’s decision on re-operation. An editorial in Joongang Ilbo stated: “It is a good decision for the Minister to go to the local population. With as much modesty as possible, he needs to have a dialogue with local residents (chu-min) and clear their doubts on safety.” While the editorial urges the local population to accept the decision of the NSSC, it proposes the government to “have sufficient open dialogue” because “no matter how safe the reactor is, it is right and just to delay re-operation when there is opposition” (July 5, 2012, Joongang Ilbo).

The invitees to the open dialogue with Hong on July 7, 2012 were not activists or Busan citizens but rather residents and council members from small villages near the Kori plant. KHNP’s press release summarized local residents’ voice as “a petition for good living conditions where local residents can coexist with the safe nuclear as experts claim” and the “spending of economic compensation for local support programs that the local population really want.” Hong’s statement on his Facebook wall (“Had dinner with local residents near the Kori power plants. Repented and thought local support programs need more careful polishing. The feeling I had while visiting villages in the rain. Will read a mail from a local resident while improving nuclear policies. It was a meaningful visit.”) was covered by edaily, Korea’s largest online newspaper. The meaning of the open dialogue between the government and the public was dubbed as the sentimental representation of local residents as people in need of economic and emotional support, instead of the public having broad concerns based on their values and demanding more inclusiveness in decision-making. Here again, the local population is assumed to be a distinct group that does not share the national-level civil organizations’ concerns over institutional transparency and accountability, such as the NSSC’s inadequacy as an independent regulator.

In fact, some local residents did demand more transparency after the NSSC’s approval to re-operate Kori-1 on July 4, 2012. Some local residents requested a time and place where they could read the documents on which the NSSC decision was based without government officials. Hong’s reaction to local residents’ demands for inclusiveness was more formal than his expressed sympathy towards their poor economic conditions. Hong said in a press conference in Seoul:

More open dialogues would be a good thing. But we should consider the living conditions of all the other people in the nation. We have patiently communicated with local residents near the Kori site yet this [an independent examination of the NSSC approval] is moving away from the direction where we achieve national consensus. We have no choice but to start re-operating the Kori-1 reactor on August 3, at least. We can save about $3 million per day if we do. ⁷ We are trying to revise the Act on Assistance to Electric Power Plants-Neighboring Areas and give the local population what they really want. (July 26, 2012, Hankook Ilbo)

Hong’s remarks indicate the situation of open dialogue within Korean nuclear policies. The government’s attention to local residents’ feeling of powerlessness cumulated over decades of socio-economic deprivation is not connected to a wider framing of risk issues or a more reflexive institutional culture of regulatory agencies, which are advocated as the goal of mutual learning in PUS literatures (Wynne, 2006). Rather, attention to emotive elements in local residents’ perception of nuclear issues led the government to narrow down nuclear risk management to a matter of economic compensation for local residents.

The minister’s remark also reveals the old assumption that nuclear energy is a necessity for the Korean public in general. Thus, communicating with the local population is good but it should not interfere with the economy and well-being of the nation. Open dialogues are not important enough to change or even delay the decision of re-operating the Kori-1 reactor. The local population can demand the government to revise the Act on Assistance on the condition that their dialogue eventually moves towards the pre-assumed consensus—nuclear energy should continue for the nation.

As the government maintains the position that nuclear energy is a necessity for the nation, the social boundary between the local population and the general public has been reproduced. The boundary constructed during the 1990s was between the general public, who supposedly support nuclear energy for national economic growth and the local NIMBY protesters. The newly reconstructed boundary is between people interested in safety and transparency in nuclear governance and the local population recruited by the government regarding dialogues and compensation. Some national-level civil organizations strengthen the divide by representing the general public’s right to demand transparency as a separate issue that has little to do with the locals’ complex concerns. ⁸ The continued separation between the local and the general public in Korea works as a context in which the old assumptions of scientific experts and institutions knowing the best for the public could coexist with new terms of public dialogue, inclusiveness and even attention to the stakeholders’ emotive feelings.