South Korea’s Nuclear Dilemmas

Since the beginning of 2018, the nuclear dynamics surrounding the Korean Peninsula have started to change rapidly and dramatically. The world is now watching a series of historic negotiations in which the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula is to be discussed. Meanwhile, South Korea’s current nuclear policies look paradoxical, mainly in two ways. First, although the Moon Jae-in administration is adhering to its nuclear phaseout policy, the country’s nuclear capacity is likely to grow during his term. Second, South Korea is continuing its research on pyroprocessing – which can be controversial especially from a nonproliferation perspective – for its future spent fuel management while at the same time pursuing the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. This article describes the country’s current nuclear capacity, reviews the history of spent fuel management in South Korea, discusses differing views of nuclear elites and the Korean public on the nuclear phaseout and back-end fuel cycle policies, and explains how these paradoxes in current nuclear policies have emerged. The article concludes that South Korea faces nuclear policy dilemmas and that the current policy incoherence could worsen in the future because of contentious internal dynamics.