South Korea and the United States have agreed to form a joint venture to enrich uranium to power South Korea’s fleet of nuclear power plants, The New York Times reports. It remains unclear whether the enrichment will occur at facilities in South Korea, which has been prevented from enriching nuclear fuel under a pact with the United States that came into force in 1974.
Inconsistency in the global supply of nuclear fuel is just one factor among many that is constraining the revival in nuclear energy, as Yanliang Pan and Miles Pomper reported in WPR in April 2023. Western companies have tried to reduce their reliance on Russia as a source of nuclear fuel, but they have sometimes lacked “the necessary capacity to step up as alternative suppliers,” according to Pan and Pomper. Other constraining factors include the lack of financing for new reactors and regulatory obstacles.
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