Jeonbuk’s Perverse Choices, from a Nuclear Waste Site to Solar Power

Buan and Saemangeum in Jeollabuk-do are beautiful places and excellent destinations for travel. The view of the West Sea from the peaks of the Byeonsan Peninsula is magnificent, and driving along the Saemangeum Seawall toward Seonyudo is also a pleasure.

But the Buan area has a painful memory. It is the conflict surrounding the construction of a radioactive waste disposal facility. In 2003, some residents joined the opposition to hosting the facility, which was led by environmental groups, and the local government’s plan to attract the facility was thwarted. For environmental activist groups, this may have seemed like a one-sided and triumphant victory, but all it left behind in the region was a deep wound. The Roh Moo-hyun administration brought the issue to a close by selecting Gyeongju as the site for the radioactive waste disposal facility. Unlike Gyeongju, which secured environmentally friendly development and quality jobs by attracting the facility, Buan still remains underdeveloped, without even a single notable industrial facility.

In Gunsan, GM Korea shut down its factory in June 2018. Even though companies and workers should have joined forces to raise productivity, the ideological struggle of the labor union blocked any path forward. This came 16 years after GM acquired Daewoo Motors in 2002. Daewoo Motors, once a rising global company, had by then become an entity whose traces were hard to find after the breakup of the Daewoo Group. The regional economy, already lacking businesses and suffering from a weak industrial base, was dealt a severe blow.

Jeonbuk has Saemangeum, a place that raised hopes of becoming a “land of gold.” Yet because the Korea Rural Community Corporation, which oversaw the land reclamation project, insisted on using it as agricultural land, it failed to develop into a foundation for industry. Recently, the government announced that it would build solar and wind power facilities on 9.4% of the reclaimed Saemangeum land. Residents expressed strong disappointment, saying, “After waiting 30 years for Saemangeum, all we get is solar power?”

Solar and wind power generation are government-led projects, so profitability is not considered all that important. As a result, they are highly likely to become merely showpiece projects in which no one has to worry about going bankrupt. Companies that sell solar facilities or corporations that generate electricity through them only need to sell the power to the state-owned Korea Electric Power Corporation. Even if profitability is low, the idea seems to be that they can still make money by receiving tax support under the banner of being environmentally friendly. But the side effects do not stop at wasting tax money. The damage may well be far greater than imagined.

The fact that reclaimed Saemangeum land was suddenly changed from agricultural land to power-generation land for electricity production shows just how favorable perceptions of solar power have become. The design life of solar facilities is usually only 20 to 25 years, not especially long. Solar modules are composed of glass, aluminum, silicon cells, and other materials. Once they reach the end of their lifespan, solar facilities become industrial waste. The cost of disposing of them is also enormous.

The term “environmentally friendly” is likely to be political language detached from the interests of local residents and the prosperity of the public. It raises doubts about whether that vast reclaimed flatland, created at great expense, could not have been used in a better way to help the local economy. Any project that ignores economic feasibility carries a high risk of becoming yet another “adverse selection” that brings pain to the Jeonbuk region.

Sung-no Choi, President of the Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: 방폐장에서 태양광까지 이어지는 전북의 역선택

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2018-11-19

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=press&pn=25&idx=11225