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by Will Davis; information for this report obtained both from the 2016 ANS Annual Meeting session on Prototype Gen-IV Reactors and from representatives of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), its subsidiary Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor Development Agency (SFRA), KEPCO Engineering & Construction,+ and Argonne National Laboratory.
Hanul (formerly Ulchin) Nuclear Station at night. (Courtesy KEPCO E&C)
Over the past four years, the South Korean nuclear power program has suffered a set of very public setbacks that cast doubt on the entire program's integrity, to the point where even the South Korean president's attention was directed at the enterprise, in addition to public support being damaged. A recent well-publicized realignment in energy policy has seen a reduction in the expected percentage that nuclear energy would contribute to South Korea's fuel mix, and in some quarters it was augured that the program had been crippled.
On Wednesday, June 6, Dr. Mark T. Peters appeared on behalf of the American Nuclear Society before the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific. Peters is the Deputy Laboratory Director for Programs at Argonne National Laboratory and testified at the invitation of the subcommittee.
More starts than stops
After giving a brief update on recent Fukushima-related events in the United States, I'd like to talk about some good (but relatively unpublicized) things that have happened during what has otherwise been a very challenging year for the nuclear industry. Then I'll discuss what, to me, was the most disconcerting story in the past year.
The View from the Panel
On Thursday, December 1, 2011, the University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute at Chicago (EPIC) released a study titled Small Modular Reactors - Key to Future Nuclear Power Generation in the U. S..
As part of the team that supported the startup of Yonggwang-3 and -4 (South Korea's first nuclear units, built in a technology transfer program with Combustion Engineering), I thought it long overdue to see a book that chronicled South Korea's journey from an impoverished nation to one of the world's leading players in the nuclear industry (e.g., South Korea has 21 operating reactors versus Germany's 17).