A recent meeting between senior U.S. and South Korean officials ended with a pledge to cooperate on dealing with used nuclear reactor fuel and other atomic operations, according to the Department of Energy.
U.S. Deputy Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette and South Korean Vice Foreign Minister Cho Hyun on Friday led the second plenary of the High Level Bilateral Commission in Washington, D.C.
The commission, established in 2016, offers a venue for the two countries to address civil nuclear issues of shared interest. Topics of discussion last week between Brouillette and Cho included used fuel, the nuclear fuel market, collaboration on export controls, and nuclear security and nonproliferation, according to a DOE press release. The two officials “agreed upon future joint technical activities in each of these areas,” the department said.
The release did not state what those activities might entail and DOE officials did not respond by deadline Monday to a request for additional information.
Nuclear power reactors around the United States have generated roughly 80,000 metric tons of used fuel over decades of operation. The federal government has at least since 1982 sought to site, license, and build a permanent underground repository for that radioactive waste. Congress in 1987 designated Yucca Mountain in Nevada as the location for the disposal facility, but the government has made little progress since then in making the repository a reality. For now, the spent fuel is kept on-site at reactor facilities.
South Korean power plants stored roughly 14,000 metric tons of spent fuel as of the end of 2015, according to the World Nuclear Association. The material is eventually to be consolidated into a temporary storage site scheduled to open by 2035. A permanent disposal site is to be selected by 2028, Reuters reported in 2016.
