The Bigger Picture; Rethinking Spent Fuel Management in South Korea, Occasional Paper No. 16

100 pages. Footnotes. Maps. Illustrations. Tables. Figures. Glossary. The James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies (CNS) strives to combat the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) by training the next generation of nonproliferation specialists and disseminating timely information and analysis. It is the largest nongovernmental organization in the United States devoted exclusively to research and training on nonproliferation issues. It is located at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, a graduate school of Middlebury College. Dr. Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress is Scientist-in-Residence at CNS and holds an M.Sc. and Ph.D. in high energy physics from Carleton University, Canada, specializing in ultra-low radioactivity background detectors and has professional experience in the field of astroparticle physics, primarily neutrino physics. He has been involved in several major discoveries in the field of neutrino physics and has worked on several international collaborations in Canada, Germany, Italy, and the United States (see below) including the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), Double Chooz and Borexino experiments. He was a member of the SNO Collaboration that won the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics. He is also a laureate along with his team of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Physics. South Korea, currently the world's fifth-largest nuclear energy producer, is in the process of becoming a major nuclear power plant exporter. according to Seoul's current energy planning, South Korea will further increase its reliance on nuclear power in order to continue economic growth without increasing carbon emissions. although South Korea has benefitted economically and developmentally from its active nuclear power sector, this reliance on nuclear energy over the last three decades has brought about one very negative consequence: an accumulation of spent nuclear fuel. although many of South Korea's reactors will likely reach their capacity for storing highly radioactive waste in their pools by the end of this decade, the ROK government has yet to designate additional capacity that would ensure continued operation of the reactors. The inability of Seoul to acquire additional storage capacity is largely a result of domestic politics-past public opposition to previous attempts to resolve the issue has left South Korea's politicians reluctant to take politically or diplomatically risky decisions to address the problem. The political issues are exacerbated by the ROK's tight population density and lack of free space for storage, which makes identifying and building a permanent repository even more complicated than in most other countries with nuclear power plants. Local populations are concerned that any interim storage facilities will indeed ultimately become permanent. to cope with its spent fuel dilemma, South Korea has been looking at the possibility of reprocessing. Seoul's current preference is to work toward pyroprocessing, which treats spent fuel to remove its extremely radioactive, but relatively short-lived, constituents (such as strontium and cesium) and leaves behind unused uranium and the extremely long-lived "transuranic" alpha-emitters plutonium and americium in fast burner reactors (which in South Korea are still in the conceptual stage), ultimately reducing the overall quantity and heat load of waste requiring permanent storage. Currently, under the US-ROK nuclear cooperation agreement, South Korea is restricted from reprocessing spent fuel. That agreement expires in March 2014, and the two sides are in negotiations for another 40-year agreement. Seoul would like to get Washington's approval to construct new facilities to test the economic and technical feasibility of pyroprocessing and then commercially operate such facilities. U.S officials have resisted granting this approval.…