hankyoreh

Kim Ji-hyeong

“The Shin-Kori 5 & 6 nuclear power plant construction effort should be continued, but reduced in scale.”

This was the “mutually beneficial” answer produced by the Shin-Kori 5 & 6 Nuclear Power Plant citizen task force after over a month of review. It showed a deft bit of wisdom: acknowledging the social value of energy production and the conflicts surrounding it, while also pointing toward a future away from nuclear power.

“The final survey of the 471 members of the citizen task force showed 59.5% supporting resumption of construction on Shin-Kori 5 and 6, outnumbering the 40.5% who supported a halt to construction by 19 percentage points,” the public debate committee explained an Oct. 20 press conference at the Central Government Complex in Seoul.

“This was well beyond the statistically significant margin of error. We will be recommending to the government that construction resume on the No. 5 and 6 reactors,” it said.

The committee also said members “were asked whether they prefer reducing, maintaining, or expanding nuclear power, and 53.2% of them supported reducing it – far more than 9.7% who supported an expansion.”

“We will be recommending that the government decide energy policy in a way that nuclear power is reduced,” it added.

Committee chairperson Kim Ji-hyeong explained, “Since the positions of those arguing for a repusumption and halt to construction of Shin-Kori 5 & 6 both have merit, and those values are all very deep-seated and earnest, we put a great deal of thought into which position to support.”

“But after three days of comprehensive discussions, the public task force produced a wise and intelligent answer,” Kim said.

The committee submitted a copy of the “Shin-Kori 5 & 6 Public Task Force Study Report” credited to the nine committee members and 471-person citizen engagement group the same day to Prime Minister Lee Nak-yeon.

“We respect the wishes of the public deliberation committee, which presented its recommendations after spending the past three months deliberating,” Blue House spokesperson Park Soo-hyun said of the government recommendation’s publication.

Park also said the administration would “do its best to ensure that follow-up measures go ahead without any problems.”

As originally announced, the administration plans to make its final policy decision on whether to resume construction of Shin-Kori 5 & 6 during an Oct. 24 Cabinet meeting. The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy (MOTIE) is to announce the Cabinet decision to Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power (KHNP), which is to hold a directors’ meeting to vote on a resumption. Once the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission completes a safety inspection, KHNP is expected to spend around one to two months removing protective facilities at the two reactors and beginning the main construction.

For the administration, the decision’s immediate meaning is a reversal of President Moon Jae-in’s election pledge to halt construction on Shin-Kori 5 and 6, prompting critics to accuse him of overreaching with his initial policy attempt. Introduced by Moon as a way of minimizing the political fallout from a halt to the plants’ construction, the public task force instead ended up tying his hands. As soon as the decision was announced, the Liberty Korea Party (LKP) and other opposition parties unanimously criticized the administration’s move to temporarily halt the reactors’ construction.

But with the public task force opting to support a future reduction in nuclear power policy, some are predicting the administration could end up with more room to maneuver in energy policy terms. The committee’s recommendation provides it with justification to push for a shift away from nuclear power at a time when a heavy backlash from the nuclear power industry and others against the abandonment of nuclear power in the wake of the Shin-Kori 5 & 6 public deliberation decision had many concerned the administration might be backtracking from its push to reduce the role of nuclear power.

Although the government was moved to hold the deliberation process by public objections to halting construction on Shin-Kori 5 & 6, it has also stated plans to approach post-nuclear energy policy solely in terms of administration procedures, producing a road map within the year for the scrapping of new plant construction plans, a ban on extensions on plant design lives, and an early shutdown of Wolseong 1.

It’s a situation where attempts to implement post-nuclear policies in defiance of public opinion could expose it to criticism – which means that the deliberation committee’s recommendation is likely to serve as a major boost to the administration’s energy policy approach. The eighth electricity supply framework plan, which MOTIE is to formulate by the end of the year, is seen as more likely to include an energy road map with a stronger post-nuclear focus.

By Lee Keun-young, senior staff writer and Lee Jung-ae, staff reporter

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