Since the 1992 ‘Joint Declaration of South and North Korea on the Denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula’ was agreed, various negotiations and policies have been conducted. There were policies such as CVID, Strategic Patience, Top-Down Approach, Calibrated Practical Approach, Audacious Initiative and the Geneva Agreement, and 9.19 Joint statement by the six-party talks were signed to denuclearize Korean Peninsula. However, starting with the first nuclear test in 2006, North Korea conducted six nuclear tests to develop atomic bombs, boosted fission bombs, ICBMs, and SLBMs to enhance its weapon capabilities. In addition, nuclear security crisis on the Korean Peninsula has been rising day by day as signs of restarting the North Korea’s Yongbyon 5MWe Graphite-moderated reactor were observed and the possibility of a seventh nuclear test have been increased. Since North Korea’s nuclear issue has a lot of influence on international security, especially on the Northeast Asian countries, a realistic denuclearization policy that reflects North Korea’s current domestic situation along with the international situation is needed. It’s been six months since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The war between Russia, which has nuclear weapons, and Ukraine, which gave up its possession of nuclear weapons due to the Cooperative Threat Reduction (CTR) program known as the Nunn-Lugar program, is expected to have a significant impact on North Korea, which is considering denuclearization due to UN sanctions on North Korea. Therefore, in this study, based on the war patterns of Russia-Ukraine war, perspective on how it could affect North Korea’s denuclearization is analyzed. Also, significance and limitations of the previous nuclear negotiations, the North Korea’s political regime, the ‘five-year strategy for North Korea’s economic development’ and the ‘five-year plan for North Korea’s economic development’ were analyzed to suggest practical DPRK’s denuclearization policy.

In South Korea, the master plan for high-level radioactive waste management, announced in 2016, suggested the construction and operation of intermediate storage facilities on a permanent disposal site and specified the adoption of dry storage in consideration of the ease of operation and expansion. As of 2021, the government is again reviewing its overarching policy on the back-end fuel cycles, including intermediate storage and permanent disposal. In the case of dry storage facilities, safety evaluation is being conducted using a combination of deterministic and probabilistic approaches, similar to that of nuclear power plants. The two methods are complementary, of which Probabilistic Safety Assessment (PSA) has the advantage of being able to identify key scenarios affecting safety, but its use in storage facilities has not been highlighted so far. However, depending on the spent fuel management phases such as loading, transportation, and storage, it may be not enough to capture effective and efficient safety evaluation only deterministically, and probabilistic methods may contribute to the evaluation of long-term operation or external events such as an earthquake. There have already been cases where PSA has been performed on a part of the nuclear fuel cycle through previous studies. This paper created the safety assessment model based on open sources such as the released EPRI reports, by targeting arbitrary intermediate storage facilities. The model considered the scenarios for loading, transportation, and storage, with human error respectively. It will be able to be modified and improved to fit domestic and specific intermediate storage facilities in the future.

North Korea claimed to have tested a hydrogen bomb in its fourth nuclear test in 2016, and declared that the hydrogen bomb was completed after the sixth nuclear test in 2017. North Korea’s operation of Yongbyon Graphite-moderated reactor has been thought to be aimed at producing plutonium, but it has been strongly argued that the restart of the Graphite-moderated reactor is, indeed, aimed at supplying tritium recently. Tritium can be used not only to manufacture hydrogen bombs, but also to miniaturize nuclear weapons, making it as a key material for nuclear weapon capability. Since upgrading nuclear weapons and developing hydrogen bombs through the use of tritium by North Korea could pose a major threat to the security of the Korean Peninsula, it is important to accurately evaluate North Korea’s nuclear weapon capabilities through the analysis of nuclear material production scenarios based on its nuclear facilities. However, researches on North Korea’s nuclear materials such as HEU (Highly Enriched Uranium) and Pu production has been actively conducted, while no research has been shown on tritium production yet. Therefore, this study aims to evaluate the tritium productivity based on the analysis of hypothetical nuclear material production facilities and possible tritium production scenarios. Basic research was conducted about the existing theoretical methodology for tritium production, the analysis of the global tritium production history, and the analysis of nuclear facilities. Based on this basic investigation, feasible tritium production scenarios were constructed. Subsequently, based on design criteria of an hypothetical Graphite-moderated reactor, possible tritium production scenario was modeled by applying the TPBAR (Tritium Production Burnable Absorber Rod). In addition, the factors such as 6Li concentration, design parameters, material compositions, and the number of TPBARs, which may affect tritium throughput were analyzed in terms of sensitivity study such that the maximum and minimum throughput can be predicted.