Minister Kim Sun-hwan of the Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment said on the 2nd that the 6.3 gigawatts (GW) of power needed to build the Honam semiconductor cluster can be secured without building additional nuclear power plants.
The Minister appeared on the radio program "Kim Tae-hyun's Political Show" that day and said, "Honam has six Hanbit nuclear reactors, and renewable energy keeps increasing, so it is the region with the most abundant carbon-free energy sources," adding, "With just a bit more on top of that, we can secure the 6.3 GW needed now."
He explained that in the Honam region, power generated by nuclear and renewable energy has not been consumed locally but has been transmitted to the Seoul metropolitan area.
The Minister said, "At times as little as 3 GW, at times around 5 GW had nowhere to be used and was flowing up to the capital region," adding, "Some of this power was slated to go to the Yongin semiconductor complex, but the bottleneck in the high-voltage transmission network consolidating this was the problem." He continued, "If new demand arises where electricity is in surplus, there is the advantage that the load on the transmission network actually decreases."
Regarding reports that Samsung Electronics requested additional nuclear facilities to run its semiconductor plants, the Minister said, "If large-scale artificial intelligence (AI) data centers are additionally built or more semiconductor fabs are added, that would be an area to consider." He added, "If there arises a need to build more at a Yongin-scale rather than the four fabs in the current plan, we will have to consider it."
On public opposition among residents to building nuclear plants, he said it is "a matter of persuasion." The Minister said, "Unlike in other countries, nuclear power is a relatively cheap energy source for Korea," adding, "There is a side to renewable energy alone that makes it difficult to run electricity 24 hours. We need to move to a new energy mix in which nuclear power is laid down as baseload and renewable energy is attached, adjusting flexibility with energy storage systems (ESS)."