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W22-trillion project on verge of collapse
Korea's push to export nuclear power plants for a massive project to build three 3.4-gigawatt reactors in Cumbria, northwestern England, worth 15 billion British pounds (22 trillion won), is reportedly on the verge of collapsing.
The Korea Electric Power Corp. (KEPCO) won a preferred bidder status beating out a Chinese competitor last December, but lost the status after negotiations broke down last month.
Ostensibly, it appears to be a contract between KEPCO and Toshiba, which has a 100 percent stake in the British nuclear consortium NuGen, but the deciding factor was the position of the British government. London wanted to push down power rates, but KEPCO wanted to maximize the electricity price to ensure profitability.
There are some problematic aspects to this, however. British media outlets reported, "Uncertainty has been created by the change in political power in Korea and the appointment of a new KEPCO head." That apparently refers to the Moon Jae-in administration's policy to phase out nuclear power generation.
The scheduled contract calls for the main contractor to run the Moorside nuclear power plant for more than three decades. The British side might have found it difficult to believe KEPCO's promise that it could maintain and repair the power station for such an extended period, while Korea would have phased out its own nuclear power stations. It is not just a matter of business but ethics if a country avoids operating nuclear plants for reasons of safety while trying to sell them to other countries.
Korea's nuclear power industry, which is reeling from the government's policy to remove plants, will face a crisis of extinction if it cannot sell its technology abroad. Korea is one of only six countries, along with the U.S., France, Japan, Russia, and China, which can export its own models of nuclear reactors. The incumbent administration is about to give up this hard-won status gripped by its nonsensical thoughts.
Britain is a country that built and ran the world's first commercial reactor in 1956 but has had to resort to import since 1995 because of a denuclearizing policy at the time. Already, few Korean college students are looking to major in nuclear physics. Who will take responsibility for this mistake later?
