Governing the Atom: State, Society, and the Nuclear Power System in South Korea

Song, Kyungah; Hoon C. Shin

doi:10.18013/jnar.2018.33.2.012

Since the construction of the first nuclear power reactor in 1970, the Korean state has played an entrepreneurial role not only in expanding the material scale of nuclear power system but in also crafting ideology and organizations to maintain a large-scale technological infrastructure. Building on the observation that the last two democratic governments (2003-2008; 2008-2013) adopted divergent approaches to the management of nuclear power system, this article tackles the following questions: how and why they chose different policies; how did the structure of Korean nuclear power system change as a result? To answer these questions, this article presents an analytical framework whose underlying idea is that a nuclear policy is formed through the intertwined dynamics of the state, societal contexts, and a technological system. In the Korean context where state-led development of technology coexists with a changing democratic environment, the state is situated both within a technology and in society. This dual position of the Korean state leads us to a better understanding of a nuclear policy in relation to the interaction between technology and society mediated by the state. This article finds that the two governments eventually contributed to entrenching the Korean nuclear power system despite their policy discrepancies.

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