"Lee will also publicize South Korea's advanced operation of nuclear power plants in seeking the peaceful use of atomic power," according to South Korea's Yonhap news agency. Lee's audience will include Obama and leaders from 46 other countries plus the United Nations, the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency and the European Union.
Whatever Lee may say, South Korea's success as a major producer of nuclear energy raises the critical question: Might South Korean scientists and engineers want to compete with North Korea in fabricating the material needed for nuclear devices?
The specter of a nuclear arms race on the Korean Peninsula touches raw nerves, nowhere more so than in Washington, as South Korea's policymakers campaign to get rid of the deal worked out between South Korea and the United States nearly 40 years ago that keeps the South from reprocessing spent fuel rods.
South Korea wants to reprocess rather than store spent fuel rods uninhibited by the ban imposed by its nuclear cooperation agreement with the U.S. But will South Korea then be able to extract fissile material for warheads? That's the question as U.S. and South Korean negotiators engage in secret talks amid efforts at getting North Korea to do away with its own nuclear program.
U.S. and Korean officials agree on one thing: the nuclear cooperation agreement is too "sensitive" to discuss openly. The talks are "technical" and "complicated", said the U.S. ambassador, Kathleen Stephens, promising to "continue our cooperation to guarantee the safety and proliferation-resistance of nuclear energy".
Americans ask, however, how much faith to place in denials of nuclear ambitions while North Korea refuses to get rid of its nuclear weapons program. It was to frustrate the dream of South Korea's then president Park Chung-Hee for the South to become a nuclear power, that the U.S. in 1972 insisted on a U.S.-Korean nuclear cooperation agreement banning reprocessing.
That agreement expires in 2014, but it's far from clear if the U.S. and South Korea can resolve their differences by then. What if pressure mounts in South Korea for a deterrent while North Korea produces ever more fissile material, already estimated at enough for six to a dozen warheads, and conducts more underground tests as it did last May and in 2006?
Koreans disavow any ambition other than a desire to extract more uranium for fuel for nuclear energy reactors and then bury the residue.
"We do not want to use the word 'reprocessing'," said Choi Jung-Bae, director of the nuclear policy division at the Ministry of Science and Technology. "We prefer to say, 'recycling' or 'reused'." The purpose of recycling, he said, is to get only useful elements in spent fuel, including uranium, in a process called "pyro-processing".
At the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute in Daejeon, a center of scientific research south of Seoul, scientists call pyro-processing "a long-term solution" for recycling spent fuel rods.
"The point is pyro-processing cannot recover plutonium," said Lee Hansoo, director of nuclear fuel cycle process development at the institute. "It cannot compare with normal reprocessing." The problem, however, is that pyro-processing, first developed in the U.S., remains in research and development. "We need more than 10 or 20 years," Lee estimated.
The issue assumes greater importance as South Korea competes as one of the world's major producers of nuclear energy reactors. KEPCO, the state-invested Korea Electric Power Corporation, has signed a deal to export four 1,400-megawatt energy reactors to the United Arab Emirates for a total of US$20 billion — the first of what the government hopes will be many more such agreements.
Korea, moreover, is becoming reliant on nuclear energy — 20 light-water reactors now produce 40 percent of the country's energy needs with 10 more due to go on line in a decade. KEPCO has overall responsibility while a single company, Doosan Heavy Industries, and is building the reactors in the industrial city of Changwon, near the major southeastern port of Pusan.
It is as though the two Koreas were already in a nuclear competition — South Korea feverishly going nuclear in terms of energy while North Korea's leader Kim Jong-Il escalates the nuclear arms race.
Doosan was building two nuclear energy reactors for North Korea under the terms of the 1994 Geneva Framework Agreement until the agreement broke down after North Korea was revealed in 2002 to have an entirely separate, super-secret program for producing the highly enriched uranium for warheads. By now, however, Doosan is deep into plans for building many more reactors for both domestic use and export.
"The vision for the Korean government," as outlined at Korea's four nuclear complexes, is to produce 100 or so reactors in 20 years, including 80 for export in competition with the U.S., Japan, France and China. Korea by 2030 expects to derive 60 percent of its energy from nuclear power.
Patriotism and nationalism are motivators. President Lee, who rose to chairman of Hyundai Engineering and Construction during its drive for contracts in the Middle East in the 1970s and 1980s, places the export of nuclear reactors among his priorities. He pressed for the deal with the Emirates — and lobbied Indian leaders to consider Korean reactors during a visit to New Delhi.
The nuclear energy complex at Uljin, about 150 kilometers southeast of Seoul, offers a window, literally, on the problem of what to do with spent nuclear fuel rods. Through thick glass visitors can stare down at huge tanks of water at the bottom of which lurk cylindrical canisters containing spent nuclear fuel rods. That's where they're stored there after having powered one of the four reactors at the Uljin complex.
"Currently we have space for spent fuel rods until 2016," said Park Chan-Sung, an official at the Uljin site, the newest of four nuclear complexes with 20 reactors operating under the aegis of the state-owned Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Co.
Atop a hill overlooking the complex at Kori, down the east coast from Uljin, where Korea's first reactor began producing power in 1978, Lee Soo-Il, a director, points to silos housing six nuclear reactors — and to two more silos awaiting installation of reactors. "Everything is stored here at this site," he said. "We are trying to figure out ways to deal with reprocessed spent fuel."
With all the emphasis on building reactors, the question of what to do with spent fuel rods assumes ever more urgency. "The challenge is to put the focus on nuclear responsibility, not nuclear sovereignty," said L Gordon Flake, director of the Mansfield Foundation in Washington. "If it becomes cast as a question of national pride and sovereignty, it could be very damaging."
Koreans have trouble, however, convincing skeptics. At the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute, physicists were discovered to have enriched tiny amounts of uranium in 2000 without even notifying their own government. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in a report issued in 2004 berated South Korea for not having reported the experiments but concluded they had stopped.
Analysts fear the IAEA investigation gives Kim Jong-Il another reason for going ahead with his own program while calling for a "denuclearized" Korean Peninsula. South Korea's desire for "energy independence" parallels North Korea's stubborn insistence on the right to be able to build nuclear explosives in case war breaks out on the Korean Peninsula.
The sad irony is that energy deprived North Korea, proud of its place as one of nine nations with nuclear warheads, has not attempted to build a single reactor for the purpose of producing electrical power.
Instead, North Korea is sure to go on demanding the twin light-water energy reactors promised under the Geneva framework if it ever returns to six-party talks on its nuclear weapons program. The need for those talks assumes special urgency while South Korea emerges as a nuclear powerhouse with the know-how to fabricate warheads if tensions rage out of control in the dreaded "second Korean war".
