Nuclear non proliferation and spent fuel policy

All of the spent fuel from the NPPs in Korea are having been stored in the interim storage pools and the amount has nearly reached the expected overall storage capacity. If this situation continues, the operation of the NPPs can not be guaranteed and a serious problem in the national energy supply system will be occurred, which depends on nuclear energy for 40% of its electric power generation. It is highly required that the plan for the spent fuel treatment be established in the near future based on the national policy with consistency. Facilities for permanent disposal could be a plausible solution, but the economic benefit of spent fuel as recycling resource is not abandonable. Recently, the efforts on strengthening the international nuclear non proliferation regime have been focused on the sensitive technologies like Uranium enrichment and reprocessing Plutonium. Those kinds of initiatives have been raised among the major groups in the international nuclear society, for example, GNEP(Global Nuclear Energy Partnership) by US, MNA(Multilateral Nuclear Approaches) by ElBaradei IAEA Director General, INFCC(International Nuclear Fuel Cycle Center) by Russia, etc. Some ideas for the recycling techniques, such as pyro processing, DUPIC, have been studied for many years in Korea, but there are still several barriers to get over including technological demonstration, and non proliferation resistance, etc. Under the present circumstance, there are not much alternatives which we can select without giving up the right of the peaceful nuclear activities and developing sensitive technologies. The spent fuel policy for proving nuclear transparency is needed to be developed, which should be based on the review of the various initiatives for limiting proliferation of the sensitive facilities and the current research status and the technological level of spent fuel recycling