This issue is not that simple to be framed as "painting the nuclear industry as evil anti-environmental cabals", like usual conservative propaganda. How many nuclear reactor actually has been shut down in last 5 years? Wait, zero? Yeah, the plan is shutting down reactors after its design life rather than blindly extending it more and more, which is the status quo.
Nuclear fission definitely has lots of advantages, but it comes with lots of geopolitical and operational challenges especially if you want to use it for decades, or so called "sustainability". One of the critical factor of "escaping from nuclear fission" was the fact that S Korea is not going to have permanent nuclear waste sites anytime soon; everyone have been talking about that over 30 years and no political party even dare to build the one because in S Korea, every single political issue eventually converges to a matter of real estate. And you know what? The capacity of the existing temporary storage for most plants will be exhausted within 5~10 years.
Now we're talking about the so-called "sustainability"; it's not about environment or whatever liberal propaganda but the dire facts that S Korea will be forced to shut down nuclear reactors unless it finds other ways around. The previous administration couldn't come up with a good solution so decided not to build more reactors. Oh yeah, they didn't even dare to shut down those reactors to earn a little bit more time. It's not even a propaganda, but just a mediocre compromise. Its territory is not big enough to construct just a single waste site.
Oh, then why don't we reprocess the waste? And now we're talking about geopolitical aspects. The US-Korea atomic energy agreement severely constrains what S Korea can do with the waste. Unlike many first world countries, it doesn't have the reprocessing technology and unlikely have the one unless it begins enjoying political tensions with the US.
Nuclear waste is just a tip of iceberg; you're going to find an arbitrary many number of operational and economical challenges on Nuclear fission reactor. And
I also want to mention general public reception on nuclear energy, "I trust nuclear energy, but not its operators". Yeah, Korean nuclear industry is well corrupted to its root and it deserves its own reputation. In the era of climate crisis, going to nuclear fission seems no-brainer, but the devil is in the detail.
Nuclear fission definitely has lots of advantages, but it comes with lots of geopolitical and operational challenges especially if you want to use it for decades, or so called "sustainability". One of the critical factor of "escaping from nuclear fission" was the fact that S Korea is not going to have permanent nuclear waste sites anytime soon; everyone have been talking about that over 30 years and no political party even dare to build the one because in S Korea, every single political issue eventually converges to a matter of real estate. And you know what? The capacity of the existing temporary storage for most plants will be exhausted within 5~10 years.
Now we're talking about the so-called "sustainability"; it's not about environment or whatever liberal propaganda but the dire facts that S Korea will be forced to shut down nuclear reactors unless it finds other ways around. The previous administration couldn't come up with a good solution so decided not to build more reactors. Oh yeah, they didn't even dare to shut down those reactors to earn a little bit more time. It's not even a propaganda, but just a mediocre compromise. Its territory is not big enough to construct just a single waste site.
Oh, then why don't we reprocess the waste? And now we're talking about geopolitical aspects. The US-Korea atomic energy agreement severely constrains what S Korea can do with the waste. Unlike many first world countries, it doesn't have the reprocessing technology and unlikely have the one unless it begins enjoying political tensions with the US.
Nuclear waste is just a tip of iceberg; you're going to find an arbitrary many number of operational and economical challenges on Nuclear fission reactor. And I also want to mention general public reception on nuclear energy, "I trust nuclear energy, but not its operators". Yeah, Korean nuclear industry is well corrupted to its root and it deserves its own reputation. In the era of climate crisis, going to nuclear fission seems no-brainer, but the devil is in the detail.