South Korea’s Nuclear-Energy Entanglements and the Timescales of Ecological Democracy

This chapter analyzes controversies surrounding nuclear-energy infrastructure in South Korea, where the density of nuclear reactors is the highest in the world. Focusing on the city of Kyŏngju – a UNESCO World Heritage site closely associated with both South Korean cultural patrimony and the authoritarian developmentalism that drove the expansion of the country’s nuclear-energy program – it asks how democratic thinking and practice reckon with the inheritance of energy infrastructure from the military-authoritarian era. The chapter examines how two unexpected earthquakes in 2016, occurring only months after the opening of Asia’s first underground repository for low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste, brought renewed scrutiny to the contingent futures of nuclear energy. Though not causally related, this improbable convergence exposed tensions concerning technocratic risk management, democratic deliberation, and the long temporal horizons of radioactive waste stewardship. Situating these debates within the post-authoritarian politics of nuclear governance, the chapter argues that nuclear infrastructure poses ethical and political challenges that exceed the compressed timelines of technocratic governance and policy-making. In light of the multimillennial timescales of the nuclear fuel cycle, the chapter explores how ecological democracy might reframe risk and responsibility within larger questions of intergenerational accountability in the nuclear Anthropocene.