Toxic ignorance: South Korea’s inattentive nuclear waste management in the Cold War period

Why did South Korea manage nuclear waste only inattentively in the Cold War period? By examining a Korean episode in global nuclear waste history, this article offers an original account of how radioactive waste, one of the Anthropocene’s most dangerous byproducts, was dismissed in authoritarian South Korea. This article argues that, by embracing international nuclear arrangements and internalizing logics of deferral and development, South Korean policymakers and scientists primarily applied the principle of economic feasibility to nuclear affairs as part of their ambitious mission to join a prestigious club of developed economies. While adopting this tempting yet myopic approach toward nuclear power generation, these leaders promoted ‘toxic ignorance’ – a reassuring yet poisonous message that the issues of radioactivity and nuclear waste were exclusive matters of elite science and thereby hardly merited the public’s attention – which downplayed and, more often than not, concealed the adverse effects of such waste on human bodies and the environment. Offering empirical grounds for reconstructing the Korean origins of disinterest in nuclear waste issues, this article shows how ‘toxic ignorance’ prevailed in South Korea during the Cold War period, a phenomenon that continues to limit public understanding of and engagement with nuclear waste issues.