Framing Analysis of Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility Placement in South Korea

The recent nuclear disaster in Japan, which is unprecedented in its size and dangerous impact on nature and human society, is becoming a focusing event that will transform the traditional way of defining environmental problems and developing solutions to the problem. Many traditional policy analyses on environment problems, especially economic evaluative studies, are conducted based on the assumption that there is an implicit agreement among the members in a society on the presence and seriousness of a policy problem. So, the impending goal is to find the most effective or efficient solution to the defined problem. Similarly, earlier analyses of the radioactive waste disposal facility (RWDF) placement case in Korea have taken the position that “finding a site for radioactive waste disposal” is a given policy task, the necessity and urgency of which has been agreed upon by everyone in Korean society. Therefore, based on the notorious 20-year history of repeated government attempts to locate a facility site, most policy analyses of the case in Korea started by defining it as a showcase of policy failure and focused on explaining why government efforts in siting the facility had repeatedly failed. Consequently, major implications from those studies were focused on providing prognostic diagnoses to avoid repeating such failures (e.g., Kim, 2002; Park and Lee, 2005; Lee, 2001; Choi, 1999; Choi, 2005; Choi and Oh, 2004). In this study, we take a different approach. We move our analytic focus away from delineating the failure factors of the government efforts. Instead, we examine an earlier temporal point in the policy process—to the problem definition stage. We question whether the repeated efforts of the Korean government’s RWDF placement efforts were in fact “failures.” We note that the significance of presence, seriousness, or urgency of the problem of finding a place to build a facility to store radioactive waste differs according to values and perspectives of the participating actors and is reconstructed through a process of political or socio-cultural interactions among policy actors: Government bureaucrats and their supporters have defined radioactive waste as “an indispensable by-product that is inevitably generated in an effort to solve the energy problem.” On the other hand, the opposing side—environmentalists and local residents—has viewed it as “a disastrous sideeffect caused by the use of nuclear energy which should be fundamentally avoided,” questioning the needs for nuclear energy itself. We behold that such markedly contrasting stances exist among participants on why it is necessary to generate and dispose of radioactive waste. According to discourse analysis scholars (e.g., Hajer and Wagenaar, 2003; Fischer, 2003; Schön and Rein, 1994), traditional approaches to policy analysis are conducted in a way that considers policy problems and solutions to be determined by preferences and interests that are fixed externally or as a result of the rational calculation based on economic efficiency. As the approach presumes preferences that are defined and fixed exogenously