A RIVAL FOR FRANCE

No country is going nuclear faster than France, but one is a close second: South Korea.

France, with 30 units (22,000 MW) now supplying 38% of the country's electricity, plans to have 56 units (56,000 MW) on line in 1990, supplying more than 70% of its delivered power.

A fuel manufacturing plant has been begun, and plans for fuel reprocessing, squashed by the Carter administration's pressures, are being considered again. And so it goes: the end result of Carters treaty abrogations and "non-proliferation" follies is the desire of every country to become self-reliant in all phases of nuclear power.

In early October, this writer visited Korea, where he participated in the World Media Conference, sponsored by News World Communications, as a member of the panel "Nuclear power and the media."

Seoul has risen from the war as a lovely, modern, clean, bustling city of a million well-fed, well dressed, industrious and intelligent people. The cars, buses, and most other industrial products are Korean. This is no Third World country: it is a modern, developed, industrial state.

Energy is only part of the picture, but one from which America could learn. Some 80% of Korea's electricity is now generated from oil, all of it imported. Nuclear power, not sunshine and windmills, will reduce this to 14%, and will help to cut the 60% overall use of oil by two thirds.

All of this has been done in a country which lacks most resources (other than some ores), and which used to be the agricultural part of the country when, like Germany, it was divided into slave-state and free.

When you ask the rulers of the East German Soviet colony why they lag so badly behind the Federal Republic, they explain that West Germany had the Ruhr and all the industry in 1945. Korea demolishes that tale. Free enterprise, not inherited wealth or resources, is what unleashes people to build a prosperous economy.

But all of this prosperity bustles under the guns poised 35 miles north of Seoul and manned by the impoverished slaves whose system can survive only by conquest: the system of the incompetents who cannot make a living except by enslaving the defenseless or milking the naive.