No, that's not what I'm suggesting. That scandal's contribution to the overall success of Korea to be able to build a standardized reactor is small.
> ... eight cases out of 2,075 samples of foreign manufactured reactor components that were supplied with fake documents.
S. Korea learned how to build nukes from the failing American company, Combustion Engineering. They then tweaked the design a bit and totally serialized its production. They have total alignment because there's one big utility doing all the work (no contract wars, suing each other, etc.). They optimized the hell out of the construction management for those projects. Many of the pioneers of Korea's nuclear industry now want to help bring the technology back to the US, they feel it's repaying a debt to the Americans from the early days of their partnership with CE. For example, this long podcast is an incredible and rare view into this stuff. [1]
> ... eight cases out of 2,075 samples of foreign manufactured reactor components that were supplied with fake documents.
S. Korea learned how to build nukes from the failing American company, Combustion Engineering. They then tweaked the design a bit and totally serialized its production. They have total alignment because there's one big utility doing all the work (no contract wars, suing each other, etc.). They optimized the hell out of the construction management for those projects. Many of the pioneers of Korea's nuclear industry now want to help bring the technology back to the US, they feel it's repaying a debt to the Americans from the early days of their partnership with CE. For example, this long podcast is an incredible and rare view into this stuff. [1]
[1] https://www.titansofnuclear.com/kunmochung#!