[News Briefing] N.Korea’s speaker asks Britain for food aid 

Posted on : 2011-04-04 13:29 KST Modified on : 2019-10-19 20:29 KST

Choe Tae-bok, chairman of North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly, appealed for food aid from Britain, saying the upcoming two months would be the most difficult, the Voice of America reported Apr. 2.
British lawmaker David Alton said in an interview with the VOA that Choe, who visited Britain from March 28 to 31 on an invitation from the British-North Korea All-Party Parliamentary Group, had requested food aid during meeting with British government officials.
Among the European nations who are generally more open to providing aid to the North, France donated $210,000 to its charity group Premier Urgence to feed the most vulnerable in the North, the radio news network also reported.  
Meanwhile, the 12-member delegation of North Korea, comprising mid-level officials from the trade, agriculture and other ministries, toured Silicon Valley on Friday while their rare two-week trip to the U.S. on the invitation of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation at University of California, San Diego since March 19.


S.Korea has 336,000 spent nuclear fuel rods  
There are a total of four nuclear power plants in Korea one in South Jeolla Province and three in Gyeongsang Province.
And according to the Ministry of Knowledge Economy and Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power, there are a total of 336-thousand spent fuel rods among these four plants as of September 2010. Out of the four, Wolsong has the largest amount of used rods, followed by Kori, Youngkwang and Uljin. Annually, 680 metric tons of spent fuel rods are produced in these reactors.
But by 2016, the containment facilities will be full and unable to hold any more used rods. So, the government publicized its plans to build a nuclear waste depository and is supposed to start selecting the construction site next year.
Korea doesn’t allow reprocessing the rods nor does it have permanent containers for them, so they are left in the tanks, like Japan, for storage before they are recycled. The spent fuel rods still retain 1 percent of the radiation compared to when in full use, and it takes seven years for the radioactive materials to diminish to a safe level. What’s more, the water used to store the rods also contains nuclear materials, so it needs to be properly disposed.
Each nuclear reactor currently holds around 18 million liters of this waste water. Eventually they will be transported to a radioactive waste disposal facility in the southeastern city of Gyeongju, which is scheduled for completion in December 2012. With the peak for nuclear waste storage quickly approaching, Korea needs to think about not only producing nuclear energy but safely disposing its waste as well.
(Arirang News)

Chaebol’s nonlisted units rely heavily on internal trading  
Unlisted subsidiaries of South Korea’s leading family-controlled conglomerates, or chaebol, depend heavily on international trading for their sales, data showed Monday, raising concerns over conglomerates’ attempts to transfer wealth and dodge taxes.
Twenty unlisted chaebol firms, whose biggest shareholders are the heirs of the group owners, saw their combined sales from internal transactions reach 3.42 trillion won ($3.1 billion), 46.1 percent of total sales as of end-December, according to the data by the Financial Supervisory Service and Chaebul.com, a conglomerate research firm.
The figure compares with the average internal transaction rate of 28 percent for all listed and unlisted subsidiaries of the country’s top 30 conglomerates, the data showed. The high internal trading rate for unlisted chaebol units is raising doubts that conglomerates placed large sums of orders with unlisted firms whose main stakeholders are conglomerate heirs.
Chaebol’s unlisted firms have long been criticized as a means of illegal wealth inheritance since most of their stakes are held by conglomerate family members and their corporate information is usually undisclosed to the public.
(Yonhap News)