Changes and Prospects of Safety Regulation Activities in Korean Nuclear Safety Research

Abstract

Nuclear power can cause radioactivity problems because of its inherent characteristics. For the past 40 years, various studies have been carried out to secure nuclear safety at academia, industry and government level. In addition, the government's role as a safety regulator to protect human and natural environment from all the risks that may arise when using nuclear energy is becoming increasingly important. We intend to analyze the trends of nuclear safety research in Korea over the past 40 years, and the effects of safety regulation activities by the key elements of nuclear safety regulation. The results of analysis on the trends of changes in the research topics qualitatively or quantitatively are as follows; in the view point of quantitative on safety researches, the number of papers has been increased as interests in nuclear energy have increased. Also, the safety regulation activities are similar to the direction in which safety studies were conducted. Based on these preconditions, we conducted the statistical analysis on research topics of the representative domestic journals related on nuclear safety issues by periods, using the key elements components required for nuclear safety. From the 1970s to the late 1980s, the economic and engineering factors accounted for a large portion of the key elements for safety regulation. The economic factors have gradually decreased since the 1990s, but the share of political and social factors as key elements of safety regulation has started to increase rapidly. In this study, we suggest that the future nuclear safety regulations should focus on raising the social and psychological level of safety sympathized with the general public, based on the high level of engineering and technical expertise.