Lest my last post left the misimpression that I consider the issue of South Korean nuclear fuel reprocessing to be unimportant, let me emphasize this: I don’t consider it unimportant, merely unpromising as a path for furthering the cause of arms control and disarmament.
To elaborate, as I see it, the case against South Korean reprocessing is best made strictly in terms of energy policy and spent fuel management. Von Hippel has shown convincingly that South Korean utilities are pushing for reprocessing, like Japanese nuclear utilities before them, basically because localities will not permit medium-term storage of spent fuel at reactor sites. Taking the spent fuel to a reprocessing facility creates the illusion that the nuclear fuel disposal problem is being solved, but in fact, a permanent repository for the most highly radioactive spent fuel components is still needed.
Von Hippel points out that in Japan, the prefecture that’s home to the country’s major reprocessing facility has been paid a huge subsidy to perform that national service; so why shouldn’t South Korean utilities, he suggests very reasonably, pay the same kind of very generous subsidy to localities willing to host an interim spent fuel storage facilities or facilities? That would obviate the need for a reprocessing complex, and almost certainly would be a much less expensive spent fuel management strategy, net.
Perhaps it wouldn’t hurt to suggest to the South Koreans that they don’t need to repeat the very costly and unfortunate mistakes their arch-rival and traditional blood enemy Japan has made in spent fuel management.
What doesn’t seem useful to me, to repeat the main message of my previous post, is to argue with the South Koreans about reprocessing as an arms control issue. At a time when North Korea has violated all nonproliferation agreements and is busily building up its arsenal of atomic bombs, focusing South Korean attention on this aspect of the problem is not likely to dissuade them from reprocessing and might very well do the opposite.
Of course a permanent ban on South Korean reprocessing could and should be a part of a comprehensive settlement on the peninsula that also denuclearizes the North. But that remains a distant–albeit absolutely necessary–prospect.
