Yoon Seok-youl sparks controversy by denying there was radiation leak in Fukushima nuclear disaster

The presidential hopeful's campaign said that there had been a misunderstanding while his remarks were being condensed for publication

Former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl delivers remarks at a People Power Party office in Seoul on Tuesday. (National Assembly photographers’ pool)

Following gaffes about letting people work 120 hours a week and defending poor-quality food, former Prosecutor General Yoon Seok-youl has now claimed that there was “basically no radiation leak” from the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan because the “reactors themselves didn’t collapse.”

Yoon made the comments in an interview with the Busan Ilbo, a newspaper in South Korea’s port city of Busan, on Wednesday, after a reporter noted that Busan, Ulsan and South Gyeongsang Province had the world’s highest concentration of nuclear reactors and that locals might have a different attitude about the current administration’s plan to phase out nuclear energy.

Yoon responded to concerns about expanding nuclear power by defending the safety of nuclear energy.

“The nuclear energy we use in Korea is different from Chernobyl. Even in Japan, the Fukushima nuclear reactors didn’t blow up. The earthquake and tsunami caused a lot of damage, but the reactors themselves didn’t collapse. That’s why there was basically no radiation leak.”

The Fukushima nuclear accident refers to a radiation leak at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, in Japan’s Fukushima Prefecture, after a massive earthquake and tsunami struck the northeastern Tohoku region in 2011.

Yoon’s claim that there was no radiation leak is contrary to the facts. His remarks on the topic were deleted four hours after the article was posted on Saturday evening, but not before they were noticed by Korean readers, sparking controversy.

Yoon’s campaign said that there had been a misunderstanding while his remarks were being condensed for publication.

“Yoon had meant to say that the damage was caused by the earthquake and the tsunami, and not by a safety issue with the reactor design, but that got mixed up when his remarks were condensed. Yoon was talking about the numerous issues with writing off nuclear power considering that Korea has a relatively low risk of earthquakes and tsunamis and that its [reactor] designs have been improved as well,” a member of Yoon’s campaign told the Hankyoreh in a telephone call on Thursday.

The Yoon campaign released a heated official statement on Sunday. “The article as it was originally posted online didn’t reflect our candidate’s intentions. There’s nothing wrong with making adjustments when one’s intentions aren’t conveyed properly. These attacks on the interview reporting process are politically motivated low blows,” the campaign said in the statement.

But experts noted that Yoon had misrepresented the very basic fact of the radiation leak.

“The Fukushima nuclear accident was when the reactor cores melted down and there was a hydrogen explosion that blew the roof off. It doesn’t make sense to say the reactors didn’t collapse,” said Seok Gwang-hun, an advisor for the Energy Transition Forum.

“Both the International Atomic Energy Agency and the Japanese government acknowledge that there was a radiation leak.”

One explanation of Yoon’s inaccurate comments about the nuclear reactors is that he’s so determined to stake out the opposite position to the Moon Jae-in administration that he fell for an uncritical defense of the safety and necessity of nuclear power.

“We definitely need to change our hasty and unreasonable policy of phasing out nuclear power,” Yoon said last month during a series of meetings with students in the nuclear engineering department at Seoul National University and in the nuclear power department at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

“Nuclear energy isn’t the sort of dangerous thing you see in the movies. The Fukushima nuclear accident had to do with the geography of Japan, and not with nuclear power itself,” Yoon went on to say.

“The argument of advocates for nuclear power is always ‘trust the scientists’ and ‘it’s safe.’ Such arguments don’t lead to a rational debate. Yoon has uncritically adopted those arguments,” said Lee Pil-Ryeol, a Korea National Open University professor and chair of the Korea Society for Nuclear Phaseout.

By Jang Na-rye, staff reporter

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