Korea declines an offer to develop new reactor

The Korean government has decided not to participate in the development of a new generation of nuclear power plants in a project agreed to by an international consortium led by the U.S. Department of Energy. Officials at the Ministry of Science and Technology told a press conference yesterday that the cost of the project would be too high and the probability of success very low. The participants in the project, to develop a sodium-cooled fast reactor, will meet in Japan this week to sign an agreement to begin work. The reactor is one of several refinements in nuclear power generating technology referred to collectively as “Generation IV.” France, Japan, the United States and three other countries will join the consortium to develop the sodium-cooled technology. Those reactors and other design concepts also called Generation IV are projected to be in operation by 2030, if all goes well in their development, and would in theory greatly improve the efficiency and lower the cost of nuclear power. Some projections, for example, say that the sodium-cooled reactor could use uranium fuel 60 times more efficiently than the light-water reactors that are in wide use in Korea today. But Lee Mun-ki, the director-general of the ministry’s Atomic Energy Bureau, suggested that the chances of such glowing predictions ever coming true were low. “We have decided not to participate in the agreement because the project has severe problems, including that the probability of developing a sodium-cooled fast reactor is low,” he said yesterday. The ministry said that Korea would have to invest $174 million a year for the next decade if it wanted to join, adding that the cost would probably rise as plans were completed and construction of a pilot plant began. Still, the decision puzzled and outraged many academics and scientists here, who argued that the nation would be the poorer if Korea were on the outside looking in. “It is hard to understand that we have voluntarily given up a nuclear development project, a field in which we could at least contribute, in the middle of a situation where the United States is trying to establish a new global nuclear order,” said a Korean professor specializing in nuclear power who wished to remain anonymous. He was referring to a call in this year’s State of the Union message by George W. Bush, the U.S. president, for the development of new energy sources and a lowering of U.S. dependence on Middle East oil. Korea now has 20 nuclear power plants in operation, and ranks sixth in the world in the amount of electricity generated by nuclear energy. But it lacks the core technology for nuclear plants and has no domestic source of uranium to provide fuel for the plants. “Although Korea ranks among the world’s top on the outside,” the Korean professor continued, “we have never been considered a developed nation in this field since we have no core technology such as that to enrich uranium.” He said passing on the new project could leave Korea even further behind the state of the art, and others joined in that criticism, saying that Korea could be doomed to importing plants and designs in the future if the new technology indeed puts those who use it at an economic advantage in efficiency. These critics said it would be very unlikely for the project members to agree to share their technology with countries that did not participate in its development. Without the intellectual property rights to the new design, they continued, energy independence for Korea would be even more elusive than it is today. The ministry apparently disagrees; yesterday it said that Korea’s best course would be to adopt the technology after it is in commercial use in other countries. The new reactor design would use liquid sodium to cool the nuclear core and transfer heat to boilers to make steam for turbine electrical generators. It would use an alloy of uranium, plutonium and other radioactive metals as fuel. It is called a “fast reactor” because unlike most current reactor designs, it does not use a moderator such as graphite rods or heavy water to slow down the neutrons that bombard the fuel and trigger the nuclear fission that gives off energy as heat. The efficient fuel use of the design would also, experts say, dramatically reduce the amount of nuclear waste that must be stored indefinitely and safely. by Park Bang-ju, Lee Ho-jeong