ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Contesting Safety: Plural Visions of Risk in South Korea’s Nuclear Plant Thermal-Effluent Disputes, 1987-1995

• In Event: Landscapes of Development: Plural Visions and the Making of State-Building Infrastructures in East Asia

English Abstract

This presentation traces how technonationalist discourse on nuclear safety was contested, reframed, and ultimately consolidated by examining disputes over thermal-effluent discharge at the Yeonggwang nuclear power plant—a large-scale infrastructure project—in South Korea between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s. Following South Korea’s transition to democracy in 1987, the discourse of “Korean-style” nuclear power—framed by South Korean nuclear technocrats as evidence of technological self-reliance—was pushed into the public arena as a site of controversy. Among the issues that surfaced, thermal-effluent discharge into the coastal waters off Yeonggwang became a focal point of contention. This presentation argues that conflicts between pro- and anti-nuclear groups over the extent and severity of thermal-effluent discharge coalesced into a scientized risk debate that ultimately consolidated the “Korean-style” label while marginalizing local voices. To argue for or against the construction of the Yeonggwang Units 3 and 4, both sides produced scientific reports in the name of objectivity but they asked different questions. Anti-nuclear groups emphasized the extent of harm—how much thermal discharge affected marine ecosystems—whereas nuclear technocrats framed the issue in engineering terms, asking how much those effects could be reduced or controlled. As the contest increasingly unfolded in the idiom of scientific objectivity, the two evidentiary logics ran largely in parallel, and nuclear technocrats dismissed activist claims as “unscientific,” further consolidating a technonationalist vision. In the process, residents’ lived experiences and local knowledge were marginalized. In short, this study shows that technonationalist discourse, exemplified by the “Korean-style” label, was constructed and stabilized through infrastructure-mediated politics of measurement and legitimacy among plural actors.

Author

• Yeseul Park, Seoul National University