As calls grow for the government to shift its policy stance on nuclear power and dams to support the "three mega projects" worth nearly 5,000 trillion won, Kim Sung-hwan, Minister of Climate, Energy and Environment, said four more nuclear reactors could be built on existing reactor sites. Kim Yong-beom, chief of the Presidential Office for Policy, also signaled bold infrastructure investment, saying, "In the era of a production revolution, the scale the state envisions must grow along with it."
Appearing on a radio broadcast Wednesday, Minister Kim said, "Even without finding new reactor sites, we could build more reactors within the current reactor sites." He added, "I was briefed that there is land to build two more reactors each at the Hanbit Nuclear Power Site in Yeonggwang, South Jeolla Province, and the Saeul Nuclear Power Site in Ulju, Ulsan." If all four reactors are built as APR-1400 units, the installed capacity would reach 5.6 gigawatts (GW). This is enough to cover nearly 89% of the 6.3 GW of power demand needed for the southwestern semiconductor cluster.
Kim Yong-beom, the policy chief, also posted an article titled "Korea's Economy, the Scale Has Changed" on his Facebook, signaling that he would boldly resolve power and water supply issues. This is interpreted as a shift in the policy stance of the Democratic Party of Korea, which was critical of nuclear power and dam construction in the past. "Building power plants and securing water is ultimately all a matter of consensus," the policy chief said. "The order cannot be reversed. Let's build fabs, and then unlock power and water." Kim Woo-chang, the Presidential Secretary for National AI Policy, also stressed in a radio interview the same day, "Decarbonization is not denuclearization," adding, "Calling it a nuclear phase-out stance is a misunderstanding."
Minister Kim emphasized that there are many sites where construction could begin immediately because of the time it takes to build nuclear reactors. Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power estimates that building a reactor typically requires 13 years and 11 months. Of this, confirming site suitability and obtaining resident consent alone takes more than four to five years. In contrast, the time needed to build the reactor structure itself is just over seven years. This means that if a site is available, a reactor could be connected to the grid within 10 years.
Adding Yeongdeok County in North Gyeongsang Province, where new reactor construction was recently confirmed, to the Yeonggwang and Ulju sites Minister Kim mentioned, the number of sites where reactors can be quickly supplied rises to eight. Earlier, Yeongdeok County offered a total of 3.24 million square meters of land when responding to the KHNP's public tender. That is three times the minimum area of 1.041 million square meters requested by KHNP. This means that even after completing the two reactors confirmed this time, four more could be accommodated.
The reactor construction plan reflecting new power demand is expected to take shape as early as September. "We must supply power to meet demand from semiconductor factories and artificial intelligence (AI) data centers," Minister Kim said. "How much of which power to increase will be contained in the 12th Basic Plan for Long-term Electricity Supply and Demand, which we roughly need to finalize around the regular Assembly session, so there isn't much time left." The regular National Assembly session opens on the first weekday of September each year and runs for 100 days.
