--- title: "POSCO Would Like to Buy Some Nuclear Reactors, Please, for the Steel" description: "Korea’s biggest steelmaker wants to fund nuclear plants in exchange for cheap power, because green steel takes a lot of electricity" author: "Nate Ledger" published: 2026-09-28T09:13:01.761Z modified: 2026-09-29T06:25:48Z url: https://rews.cc/a/posco-would-like-to-buy-some-nuclear-reactors-please-for-the-743d67 language: en tags: ["nuclear", "steel", "energy", "infrastructure", "climate", "asia"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # POSCO Would Like to Buy Some Nuclear Reactors, Please, for the Steel *Korea’s biggest steelmaker wants to fund nuclear plants in exchange for cheap power, because green steel takes a lot of electricity* By Nate Ledger · September 28, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/posco-would-like-to-buy-some-nuclear-reactors-please-for-the-743d67 ## In brief - POSCO is in talks to argue for private investment in nuclear power at an Oct 7 green-transition briefing chaired by President Lee - Full conversion of POSCO’s 34.5m tonnes of output to hydrogen-reduction steel would need about 24GW, roughly 17 large reactors - POSCO estimates its annual power bill could rise tenfold to 5 trillion won as byproduct-gas generation falls away - Earlier ideas included funding a Wolsong-1 restart in exchange for long-term power purchases; the government balked over safety - Korea has no mechanism for long-term fixed-price nuclear power purchases, which experts say would also need to change Imagine you run a steel company. Hypothetically. Your plan for the next few decades is to stop making steel with coal and start making it with hydrogen, because your customers and your regulators would prefer steel that did not involve quite so much carbon. You sit down with a spreadsheet and discover that to split enough water to make enough hydrogen, and then to melt the resulting iron, you will need roughly the output of seventeen large nuclear power plants. At which point the spreadsheet gently suggests that maybe you should buy some nuclear power plants. This is, more or less, the position POSCO has arrived at. Korea’s biggest steelmaker is discussing with the government a proposal to make the case for private corporate investment in nuclear power at a green-transition (GX) briefing chaired by President Lee Jae-myung on October 7, according to reporting by the Chosun Ilbo. The deal POSCO has in mind is simple: we put up money for reactors, you let us buy cheap electricity from them for a long time. It is internally reviewing various structures, including a joint venture with the state nuclear operator Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power. It would be the first private-sector nuclear investment in Korea. The arithmetic is worth doing because it is startling. POSCO’s chosen route to green steel is hydrogen-reduction steelmaking — pull the iron out of iron ore using hydrogen instead of coal. Industry figures cited by the Chosun Ilbo say one hydrogen-reduction plant producing 2.5 million tonnes a year needs 1.7 gigawatts of power. POSCO’s domestic steel output in 2025 was 34.5 million tonnes, so converting all of it implies about 24 gigawatts of demand — the capacity of roughly 17 large reactors. Seventeen reactors, for one company’s decarbonization plan. Right now POSCO gets about 90% of the power it needs by burning byproduct gases from its own steelmaking, and its annual electricity bill runs around 500 billion won. The annoying thing about decarbonizing a steel mill is that the byproduct gas is a byproduct of the coal: use less coal and you have less gas to burn, so you must buy far more power from outside just as hydrogen production and the new process crank up consumption. Internally, POSCO reportedly estimates its annual electricity bill could swell tenfold, to 5 trillion won. And because a steel mill runs 24 hours a day, the company does not believe intermittent solar and wind can supply it on their own. The trade press has heard the same message from the company itself: according to [Steel & Metal News](https://www.snmnews.com/news/articleView.html?idxno=575217), POSCO has presented nuclear as “the most realistic” option for supplying its HyREX hydrogen-reduction process with carbon-free power and clean hydrogen. So its ask to the government covers both large new reactors and small modular reactors. This is not a new enthusiasm. POSCO has reportedly been carrying private nuclear investment ideas to the government since June of last year, when the Lee administration took office — more than a year of proposals in various shapes. The most representative was elegantly symmetrical: POSCO and other companies would pay to refurbish the long-idled Wolsong-1 reactor, and in return buy the restarted plant’s power under a long-term contract. The government balked, citing safety concerns about the aged unit, so POSCO widened the menu to private-investment large reactors and SMRs. The logic throughout is that POSCO is not asking for a handout so much as permission to solve its own problem with its own money. There is one catch, and it is the interesting part: even if reactors get built and POSCO helps pay, it cannot currently secure the benefit it is after. Korea has no institutional mechanism under which a company can buy nuclear-generated power at a fixed price for a long term — no long-duration nuclear PPA regime. The power market is the power market. Cho Young-tak, former head of the Korea Power Exchange, told the Chosun Ilbo that POSCO competes with cheap Chinese steel and would struggle to keep price competitiveness after decarbonizing if it cannot lock in cheap carbon-free electricity, and that big industrial power users need a way to secure the generation they require directly. Building seventeen reactors’ worth of capacity is the easy part, in a sense. Getting the electrons to your mill at a price you agreed upon twenty years earlier is the regulatory puzzle. If POSCO’s request is granted, the proposal probably will not stay POSCO’s for long: the Chosun Ilbo notes that similar demands could spread to other power-hungry industries such as semiconductors and petrochemicals, and POSCO met with president-level executives from Samsung Electronics on the 28th to exchange views on private nuclear investment and securing carbon-free energy. Of course it did. If you were running any huge electricity-guzzling business in Korea, you would want to be standing near POSCO when this particular door gets opened — preferably second in line, after the company that spent a year doing the asking.