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Nuclear Weapons & Proliferation
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Kim Dae Jung Regime May Avoid Plutonium Use Political and industry sources said this week that the new government of South Korean President Kim Dae Jung will likely look askance at previous plans to reprocess spent nuclear fuel from Korean reactors and then use the recovered plutonium as fuel. When Kim was elected this spring, he replaced Choing-Hun Rieh, the CEO of Korea Electric Power Corp. (Kepco), the owner and operator of all of Korea's nuclear power reactors, with Chang Young-Shik, a Korean economist who until the election had been living in the U.S. and Canada. Rieh outspokenly supported the option to reprocess Korea's burgeoning inventory of spent fuel in Britain and France and then returning the plutonium to Korea for use as reactor fuel. Sources said, however, that Chang is more comfortable with the once-through nuclear fuel cycle favored in the U.S. and Canada, and has been backed by Korea's Ministry of Science and Technology to retain its ''wait and see'' policy on what to do about the nuclear spent fuel. In addition, Chang is close to his brother, a member of parliament in the Korean National Assembly. The brother, previously in the opposition to ex-president Kim Young Sam, has made frequent statements against Korea's nuclear expansion program including the use of plutonium fuel, political sources in Seoul said. U.S. Chose Not to Link Russo-Indian Reactor Deal to IMF Bailout After some internal considerations, the U.S. government chose not to press the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to link its $11.2-billion bailout of the Russian Federation's treasury to a pledge by Russia not to provide soft loans to India for construction of two Russian VVER-type reactors. Since 1992, the U.S., and other members of the Nuclear Suppliers' Group (NSG), an international nuclear export control body, have vociferously objected to plans by Russia to export the reactors to India, which is not a member of NSG and has a clandestine nuclear weapons program. In that year the NSG began demanding that inspectors be placed in all nations receiving nuclear exports, a demand India never complied with. Yet Russia claims it can go ahead with the exports because the deal, negotiated before 1992, is grandfathered by the NSG rule. When Russian President Boris Yeltsin last month formally requested the IMF to bail out his crisis-ridden finances, nonproliferation officials in several NSG governments said the U.S. might try to hinge the economic aid on a change in Russian nuclear policy. The US could have asked Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy to halt loans to India of the up to $1-billion in soft money needed to build the Russian reactors, but last week, U.S. officials said the nonproliferation bureaucracy in Washington did not do so. Critics inside the bureaucracy said the Clinton Administration, which had said it sought an international nuclear supply boycott against New Delhi, lost a key opportunity to stymie the controversial reactor supply deal to India, closed only days after India tested nuclear weapons in May. Others said the U.S. just has more pressing nonproliferation concerns with both Russia and India, like ratification of the START II treaty and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). Germans Crack Down on Illegal Pakistan Trade In the wake of Pakistan's series of nuclear weapon tests, a German court sentenced a convicted violator of nuclear export laws to 3.5 years in jail, saying he should have known the equipment he exported to Pakistan since 1988 was destined for its nuclear weapons program. The exporter sent preformed parts for gas centrifuges to the A.Q. Khan Research Laboratory (KRL) at Kahuta, which is the heart of Pakistan's clandestine uranium enrichment program. This case marks the second time that Germany has cracked down on illegal nuclear trade. In 1993, judges convicted another German exporter for having smuggled gas centrifuge equipment to Iraq. In the Pakistan case, the court established the precedent that even
partly-finished equipment for nuclear weapons-related activities are covered
by German export control laws, further restricting future illicit commerce. Nuclear Watch is written exclusively for Global Beat. Mark Hibbs is 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 | |
