South Korea's nuclear chance after Chernobyl

As a boy growing up in 1950s South Korea, Jooho Whang had seen nuclear power plants only in science fiction cartoons. At the time, atomic power in his homeland was a distant dream.

The country was emerging from the shadow of a devastating war with North Korea, and its per capita GDP was a mere US$876 (Dh3,217).

So when in 1987, after several years out of the country, Jooho Whang came face to face with the nuclear reactor Kori 1, the nation's first, he was struck with awe.

"It was the first constructed building I ever saw that was built so fancy," says the nuclear scientist, laughing at the joy of the memory. "I was overwhelmed by concrete structures containing shiny stainless steel tanks and pipes going this way and that way. It was beautiful."

Mr Whang was an early recruit to his country's nuclear programme. Kori 1 had begun powering homes and industry in 1978, the first of 23 reactors that would ultimately produce a third of the nation's electricity.

The power from those plants has fuelled South Korea's rapid transformation from a developing economy to one that today donates to poorer nations.

A former importer of nuclear technology and know-how from the United States, South Korea has transformed itself into an exporter, with Abu Dhabi its first customer. And it steps into the limelight this week as the host of an international summit on nuclear security backed by the US president Barack Obama.

Mr Whang, who is the president of the Korea Institute for Energy Research, was in Kuwait this month for talks on a project to test Korean-designed solar-powered homes. Sitting in the gold-bedecked lobby of Kuwait City's Hotel Missoni, Mr Whang could not have been farther from the Korea of his childhood.

But the country's remarkable economic transformation has created a society that is today more questioning, more concerned and hungrier for information - including on nuclear matters.

"The basic issue is this: Korea has enjoyed an extremely high level of public confidence in its nuclear programme for 35 years," says Mark Hibbs, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "And the more wealthy it gets, the more internationally connected Korea gets, the more difficult it will be to move ahead."

A report from the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission, the Korean regulator, this month detailed a power system failure at Kori 1 in February while it was in cold shut down.

The cooling systems for the reactor core and spent-fuel ponds stopped working, sending the temperature of the core coolant soaring from 36.9¿C to 58.3¿C and the spent-fuel ponds from 0.5¿C to 20.5¿C within 12 minutes. Staff did not report the anomaly immediately and deleted records of it, according to the report.

In response to the Kori 1 incident, Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power, the plant operator, fired the plant manager, according to the Yonhap News agency. It now faces prosecution by the regulator. In Seoul last week, Kim Jong-shin, the chief executive, downplayed the matter but pledged to bring in international experts to advise on improving safety standards.

"It was an isolated case, and it was initiated by a very, very minor workman's error," Mr Kim said on the sidelines of an industry conference. "In terms of transparency, I will try to work more from the people's perspective and spread the safety culture."

Mr Kim and others in the industry have come under the scrutiny of the Korean media amid concerns about transparency and the safety of ageing reactors, especially among a public already frightened by the emergency that began last March in Fukushima, Japan.

South Korea is also grappling with dilemmas such as where to store radioactive spent fuel over the long term, a controversial matter that has yet to be resolved even in the US. On the eve of this week's nuclear summit in Seoul, protesters near the main convention centre held signs with the words "No Nuke". "These were not pressing questions two decades ago," says Mr Hibbs. "It's natural and inevitable that as Korea becomes more internationally connected, its public becomes more aware of the risks of nuclear energy."

It is a different world than the one that Mr Whang encountered when he was entering the field in 1975.

He enrolled in a nuclear engineering programme because "it sounded very fancy". At the time South Korea had no nuclear plants; Kori 1 was in its fourth year of construction, and was three years away from producing power.

The government was intent on recruiting its best and brightest to the nuclear programme, both from inside the country and among Koreans who had moved abroad to study and work.

The oil price shock of 1973 had made it clear that South Korea needed to diversify beyond fossil fuels and finding itself at the mercy of market prices.

But there was one problem. The country depended on export-credit financing to pay for the major up-front investment in nuclear power. It wanted to become self-reliant, and that required getting rights to its own nuclear technology. "We knew we could not start from scratch. We knew we had to import state-of-the-art technology. Our stipulation was, who would give us the best technology transfer?" says Kim Byung-koo, a mechanical engineer working at Nasa who was recruited back to South Korea in 1975 to the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute.

"Of course, Korea exporting nuclear seemed such a remote dream at the time," he says.

South Korea began negotiating with three international vendors. Its proposal to the vendors that they forgo a royalty, should Korea ever export the technology, was met with laughter. But the tenor of the talks shifted in 1986 when the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine put a damper on the nuclear programme worldwide.

"It turned out to be such a big blessing for Korea, because everyone just shut down. New projects were just thrown out the window and existing nuclear plants were put under moratorium," says Mr Kim. "In the nuclear market, there were no buyers - except Korea.

"Because of Chernobyl, the contract negotiations became so much in our favour. We could say anything and they couldn't say no."

South Korea signed a deal with an American vendor that would allow the country to receive the technology and export it in the future without a royalty. That laid the foundation for its export contract with the UAE more than two decades later.

On Korea's south-east coast, the squat lines of the 600-megawatt Kori 1 power station lie just a kilometre or two south of the construction sites for the latest model in Korean nuclear technology - the APR 1400, which is also expected to be built in Abu Dhabi. Cranes loom above the reactors' concrete domes, and beyond them lies the open sea.

ayee@thenational.ae

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