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According to U.S. experts, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) cannot use established means of anaysis to verify the nuclear materials inventory of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Spent nuclear fuel unloaded from an unsafeguarded graphite reactor at the Yongbyon Nuclear Research Center has been cooling off for over four years and the DPRK continues to refuse to give IAEA inspectors full access to it. Under terms of a 1985 agreement with the IAEA to uphold the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), the DPRK must give the IAEA access to this irradiated fuel, which may contain enough plutonium for several nuclear bombs. Since the fuel was unloaded, the IAEA has repeatedly told the United Nations Security Council that the DPRK is not in compliance with its NPT agreement. Until the IAEA certifies that the DPRK to be in compliance with the NPT, however, the U.S. cannot bring into force a nuclear cooperation agreement between Washington and Pyongyang. That agreement, confirms the U.S. Department of State, is a firm requirement for any U.S.-DPRK nuclear trade. It must be in place before U.S. industry can export nuclear reactors to the DPRK, under the auspices of the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), in exchange for pledges by the DPRK to put all its nuclear activities under international control and IAEA inspections. In 1992, the DPRK provided the IAEA an initial statement of its holdings of nuclear material; this declaration was a requirement under the DPRK's NPT obligations. Because of numerous inconsistencies which turned up during IAEA inspections in the DPRK, and because of intelligence information indicating that the DPRK may have lied to the IAEA, however, the IAEA now wants to verify precisely the North Korean declaration. This will require that the IAEA carefully examine all the fuel discharged from the reactor in 1994. U.S. experts involved in trying to solve this problem have stated that because the fuel has been out of the reactor for nearly four years, there has been too much radioactive decay in the fuel and it is therefore too late for the IAEA, using its established analysis methods, to check the fuel against the DPRK statement. The experts said that, had the DPRK turned the fuel over to the IAEA during the first two years after it was unloaded, the IAEA could have measured its contents. A critical question now is whether the IAEA can develop new methods to verify the DPRK statement at an acceptable level of precision. The IAEA and U.S. national laboratories are currently exploring potential new methods. In the meantime, after more than five years of negotiations, the IAEA hasn't even succeded in gaining access to the complete operating records of the DPRK reactor. These documents would be necessary in any case for the IAEA to verify the spent fuel inventory. According to the State Department, no negotiations concerning access to the operating records are currently underway. U.S. experts said that, because of technical obstacles to verification, even if the DPRK were to cooperate with the IAEA it may take five years or more for the IAEA to verify the inventory, assuming it does develop an acceptable measuring technique. That may put the beggining of construction of any KEDO reactors in North Korea off until 2004, they said. According to the plan made by the U.S., South Korea, and Japan back in 1995, the first of two reactors was scheduled to be finished and operating by 2003.
North Korea: State Department Denies Chosun Ilbo Report on U.S. Funds for Reactors Last week the South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported that the U.S.
would spend "about $300- to $400-million" on the project to export
nuclear reactors to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). This
would break with repeated past U.S. statements that the reactors would
be funded entirely by South Korea, Japan, and other countries. The article
further quoted U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia Stanley
Roth as urging the U.S. Congress to "positively review" the matter.
On February 24 a U.S. State Department official denied the report, and
stated that U.S. "has not made any commitment to pay for the reactor
export nor has Roth made any public statement about this." Meanwhile,
sources close to the project claim that there is a "raging debate"
going on within the Clinton Administration about whether the U.S. should
accede to South Korean demands it pay some of the cost for the reactors.
Thus far, the U.S. has budgeted $40 million in FY 1998 and $35 million
for FY 1999 for the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO),
and those funds are only to be used for administrative costs and the delivery
of fuel oil to North Korea. Nuclear Watch is written exclusively for Global Beat by Mark Hibbs, the European Editor of Nucleonics Week and Nuclear Fuel, leading specialist newsletters on international nuclear affairs, published by McGraw-Hill, Inc. Hibbs, based in Bonn, Germany, covers nuclear energy and proliferation problems in Europe, the former Soviet Union, and Asia. Mark Hibbs' coordinates: Return to Global Beat Home Page Nuclear Watch | East Asian Security | Economic & Monetary Union | NATO Expansion | Nuclear Weapons and Proliferation | U.S. Defense Policy | Publications | Events | |
