hankyoreh

A seventh round of negotiations to amend the South Korea-US Atomic Energy Agreement began on June 3 in Seoul. The two-day talks are the first since the two sides pledged to extend the agreement’s deadline two years from its original date of March 2014 and hold quarterly negotiations on it, a decision reached after South Korea and the US failed to bridge their differences during a sixth round of talks held in Washington in April ahead of a May summit.

But while President Park Geun-hye has continually emphasized the importance of amending the agreement, the mood at the talks is low-key, even after Park called explicitly for a “more advanced and mutually beneficial” agreement at her summit with US President Barack Obama and in her address to US Congress.

Two possible reasons for the lack of tension are the pressure drop after the deadline extension and the replacement of the chief US representation in the interim. Seoul, for its part, appears to have made inadequate preparations for talks, with Minister of Foreign Affairs Yun Byung-se complaining about “the failure to allocate enough staff to our atomic energy negotiation team to match the importance of the issue.”

But the biggest problem may be that Seoul’s aims and strategies are both unclear and unrealistic. The “more advanced and mutually beneficial” approach favored by Park essentially involves ensuring a stable fuel supply through pyroprocessing - a method of reprocessing spent fuel - and uranium enrichment. Park has been focusing her energies on establishing South Korea’s authority to use pyroprocessing to resolve the issue of temporary storage for spent fuel, which is expected to reach full capacity at the country’s nuclear power plants starting around 2016.

The argument is very shaky. Processing the accumulated stores of spent fuel is certainly a pressing issue, but it makes little sense to focus so much on pyroprocessing - which requires at least about 20 years for commercialization - while neglecting to build interim storage facilities. It is also confusing that South Korea would demand reprocessing and enrichment rights that open itself up to suspicions of weapons development when it is trying to get North Korea to denuclearize. Indeed, the US is already questioning its aims, noting that pyroprocessing can also be used to extract plutonium.

We’ve now had six rounds of negotiations on the issue since October 2010. The fact that they have only succeeded in extending the deadline by two years means that negotiations have essentially failed. The South Korean government needs to analyze exactly why that happened and set a new goal and strategy for subsequent talks. And that goal and strategy must be focused on achieving denuclearization of the peninsula and the safe operation and management of nuclear power generation. By sticking to its reckless emphasis on reprocessing and uranium enrichment, the government is only setting itself up for more failure.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]