What South Korea can learn from Japan’s nuclear phase-out

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What South Korea can learn from Japan’s nuclear phase-out

Blogpost by Justin McKeating - September 19, 2012 at 14:40 1 comment

Last week’s announcement by the Japanese government that the country wants to abandon its dependency on nuclear power and become nuclear-free sends a strong message to the government of South Korea.

However, ignoring the momentous news from Japan, South Korea’s Ministry of Knowledge and Economy (MKE) has in the last few days named the potential construction sites for new nuclear reactors. If the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) and specific geological tests are approved, the new reactors will be built.

This confirm‎s that the government is still hell-bent on chasing their nuclear expansion plans rather than listening to the calls from their citizens to go nuclear free.

After the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan has said it wants to phase out nuclear power entirely. On the other hand, South Korea is taking the completely opposite road and aiming for 59% of its electricity being produced by nuclear.

According to the Japanese blueprint, the government will cancel new nuclear plans, old reactors over 40 years old will be decommissioned, and renewable energy production rates will be tripled.

Although there is still a lot to solve regarding the highly dangerous problems of nuclear waste from its reactors, the fact that the government is starting to listen to the concerns of the citizens despite the pro-nuclear stakeholders is hugely significant.

Japan isn’t unique in this. As we’ve seen in the past year, countries previously labelled as leaders in nuclear power such as Germany and Belgium have also chosen to phase out their reactors.

Even one of the world’s biggest nuclear players France is planning to downsize its nuclear power share from 75% to 50% by 2025.

South Korea, a so-called rising nuclear star after clinching a $20 billion deal in 2009 to build four nuclear plants in the United Arab Emirates now finds itself increasingly isolated. A nuclear-free future is not a choice, it’s inevitable.

The government is gambling with the future of its citizens not to mention the millions in public cash being invested on nuclear research and development, and PR (otherwise known as spin, propaganda and greenwash). The public are also the ones who will pay the financial costs in the event of a nuclear accident as well as having to deal with the impact on their lives.

It’s clear from all this that the government is simply not willing to listen to the people of South Korea. The only people they are listening to are the power companies with their eyes on profits and the construction companies  fighting for building contracts. Instead of representing their voters, the government is fighting for vested interests.

Just as the Japanese government is beginning to learn the lessons from Fukushima, so too should South Korea. It should abandon both plans for new nuclear reactors and the illusion that nuclear power is a safe, clean and cheap power source.

Greenpeace has fought along side the people for a nuclear-free Japan. We will continue that fight along side the people of South Korea until the day the government realises a better, cleaner, safer and renewable and sustainable future is waiting.

http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/nuclear-reaction/what-south-korea-can-learn-from-japans-nuclea/blog/42186/

While Japan turns away from nuclear power, South Korea sticks to its path

In the same week that Japan mothballed its last reactor, South Korea began work on two new nuclear power stations

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• • Mark Lynas in Seoul
  • guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 May 2012 16.29 BST
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Seoul by night. South Korea is looking increasingly to nuclear to power its energy needs. Photograph: Jose Fuste Raga/Corbis

The traffic lights are still blinking in Odaka town, north-western Japan, but few cars pass through these deserted intersections. Frozen in time after being hit by the triple disaster of earthquake, tsunami and meltdowns in the nearby Fukushima Dai'ichi nuclear plant, tables are still laid in partially-collapsed restaurants and cars are stacked up against railings where they were deposited by the retreating wave. When I visited last week, a deathly silence reigned, the only noise the chirruping of frogs in uncultivated rice paddies on the edge of town, and the bleeping of my dosimeter.

Radiation readings in Odaka are well below anything that could be considered a health risk, but people are still not coming back. Indeed, the long shadow cast by Fukushima has extended over a much wider area than any scientific assessment of radiological hazard would argue is necessary. In Minamisoma, 20km north of the stricken reactor, a community centre above the town is decked out for indoor play because no one wants to let their children venture out of doors. The parents refuse to believe that radiation readings are low enough – barely above normal background, on my dosimeter – that their children's health would be improved by letting them play outside in the fresh air. Watching the kids cooped up in a big wooden hall, I could only conclude that unnecessary fear of radiation is just as much a hazard as the real thing.

On a wider scale still, unnecessary fear of radiation now presents a serious hazard to the world's climate. Japan's precipitous exit from nuclear power generation – the day I arrived in Tokyo was the first non-nuclear day in Japan for 42 years – has pushed the country's fossil fuel demand through the roof, with imports of oil and gas up by more than 100% since last year, their ballooning cost driving a record trade deficit of $32bn. As carbon emissions rise in lockstep, Japan's leaders are now backing off from their international climate change commitments, which the country has no chance of meeting. Given that wind, solar and geothermal account for less than 1% of Japan's electricity generation, the country will be massively dependent on fossil fuels for decades to come if the reactors stay switched off. The only alternative is blackout.

Given the trauma of the March 2011 tsunami disaster, Japan's nuclear shutdown is understandable – if regrettable from a global warming perspective. But a flight across the Sea of Japan to its neighbour South Korea shows a very different model in evidence.

In the same week that Japan mothballed its very last reactor, Korea broke ground on two new-build nuclear power stations – a pair of APR-1400 units now being constructed at Shin Ulchin, on the east coast. They are two of eight new stations planned to add to the country's existing nuclear fleet of 23, currently supplying 45% of the nation's electricity. To mark the occasion the country's president, Lee Myung-bak, paid a visit to the site, praising a "huge milestone" for South Korea's engineers, who had helped the country achieve "the dream of independent nuclear technology".

It is not that South Korea is not green. In fact the mantra of "green growth" has been a central component of President Lee's policy platform since 2008, and this month – even as Japan backed away from its own climate commitments – Korea's legislature unanimously passed a new climate act which will enforce carbon caps and an emissions trading scheme among its heavy industry and electricity sector. The country's international carbon emissions target is for a 30% cut below "business as usual" emissions by 2020, a commitment its leaders say they intend to deliver on. It also spent a higher proportion of its post-economic crash stimulus package on environmental initiatives than any other country.

South Korea is anxious to export its green growth model to other countries. Last week President Lee spoke at a landmark summit held by the Seoul-based Global Green Growth Institute, reiterating his view that there need be no automatic trade-off between rapid economic growth and environmental sustainability. In respect of Japanese sensitivities, he refrained from addressing the centrality of nuclear to Korea's green growth plans, but tension between the competing visions for what counts as "green" were evident throughout the two-day meeting. The president was immediately followed by the Japanese telecoms billionaire Masayoshi Son, who – having reinvented himself as head of the new Japan Renewable Energy Foundation – dramatically declared that there should be "no nuclear for mankind anywhere in the world, for the sake of the future, for the sake of our children, for the Earth".

The Korean hosts clapped politely, but did not appear convinced – hardly surprising given that Masayoshi Son's only proposed alternative to nuclear generation was a scheme for a pan-Asian supergrid linking Japanese cities with thousands of solar and wind plants supposedly to be built across the Gobi desert in faraway Mongolia. The plan would cost trillions and take decades to implement – and would leave Japan dependent on power lines crossing its energy-hungry and often less-than-friendly neighbour China. Koreans know that their economic miracle has been built on practical engineering success, not magical thinking.

The chair of the Green Growth Institute, Dr Han Seung-soo, himself a former prime minister of Korea, told me later: "Once the safety aspect is guaranteed there is no cleaner source than nuclear. It is clean energy because the amount of emissions created is almost nil." When I asked if Korea had a target for wind and solar deployment, he shook his head. Looking out of the window, from the centre of an Asian megacity with impressive skyscrapers in every direction as far as the eye could see, the idea of powering Seoul with renewables did seem nonsensical.

The truth is that, as in Japan, the proportion of solar and wind on the Korean grid is tiny, about 0.25% – most of the country's power comes from coal, and the only way to reduce its carbon emissions significantly is to continue to replace coal plants with nuclear. Yet as the post-Fukushima anti-nuclear hysteria continues to drag many countries – from Japan to Germany to Switzerland – back towards the fossil fuels age, South Korea is quietly getting on with reducing its carbon emissions while continuing its growth miracle.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/may/17/japan-nuclear-south-korea