We Have Already Built High-level Radioactive Waste Repositories

Abstract

This paper analyzes the legal, political, and social meanings of high-level radioactive waste (HLW) management in South Korea, focusing on the Special Act on the Management of High-Level Radioactive Wastee nacted in 2025. Using actor-network theory (ANT) as its theoretical framework, the paper explores how legal, technological, and social elements interact and clash while nevertheless functioning together as a seemingly stable system. Since the operation of Kori Unit 1 in 1978, HLW has steadily accumulated in spent fuel pools and on-site storage facilities within nuclear power plant grounds. Although these sites have stored HLW for decades, they are not legally or socially designated as “waste repositories.” The burden of hosting such undesirable facilities, essential for the preservation and management of HLW, has long been concentrated on certain local communities, while for the majority of citizens, the issue has faded from everyday awareness. One of the key issues in the legislative process of the Special Act—the clause limiting the storage capacity within nuclear power plant sites—was perceived, on one hand, as a mechanism to constrain the lifespan extension of nuclear reactors. Yet, on the other hand, it functioned as an institutional arrangement that enabled the industry to pursue lifespan extensions indirectly through strategic responses (e.g., utilizing wet storage pools within the plants). Civil society, too, strategically employed the language of “participation” to secure influence over nuclear policy, thereby adding complexity to the meaning and purpose of participation itself. This study emphasizes that material and technological changes pursued through legal and institutional means do not arise simply through procedural rationality, and that the self-referential consistency of law is not easily shaken in the absence of external shocks. It concludes that transformation of the HLW management system can only occur on the foundation of structural change, and that at present, the conditions necessary to fundamentally alter the uneven placement of undesirable facilities and materials are not yet visible.