North Korea announced on Tuesday it intended to build an unspecified number of light-water reactors, saying the United States had reduced a 1994 deal on mothballing nuclear power plants to a ”dead document.”
Pyongyang’s official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said in a dispatch that the Stalinist regime would also resume the construction of two graphite moderated reactors (GMRs) frozen under the 1994 accord.
North Korea will ”start developing and building LWRs [light-water reactors] of Korean style in reliance upon its indigenous technology and potential when an appropriate time comes to put further spurs to its peaceful nuclear activities,” it said.
The power plants are at the centre of six-nation talks on the North’s nuclear programme, amid fears that Pyongyang could reprocess spent fuel to arm nuclear weapons.
Uranium from the light-water reactors, however, cannot be used for weapons development.
Chon Hyun-Joon of the state-financed Korea Institute for National Unification said experts here were skeptical about North Korea’s ability to develop light-water reactors, citing its lack of expertise and cash.
The 1994 deal led North Korea to freeze a five megawatt reactor and a partially-built 50 megawatt reactor, both in Yongbyon, about 90km north of Pyongyang.
In April 2003, North Korea said it had begun reprocessing more than 8 000 spent nuclear fuel rods to make plutonium from its five-megawatt reactor. It also threatened to resume construction of other reactors in Yongbyon.
And in June this year it said it had a stockpile of nuclear bombs.
The five-megawatt reactor in Yongbyon alone is reportedly capable of producing enough uranium fuel to make about seven kilograms of plutonium annually, enough to make a single atomic bomb.
The two graphite moderated reactors that Pyongyang wants to develop, would, if completed, be capable of producing enough spent fuel annually for 200kg of plutonium, sufficient to manufacture nearly 30 atomic bombs per year, US experts said.
Frozen facilities also included another partially-built 200 megawatt nuclear power plant in Taechon County in the northwestern province of North Pyongan.
The North also made a fresh demand for compensation for the ”huge” losses it suffered by scrapping the project to build the light-water reactors (LWRs).
”The US is now under a legal and moral obligation to compensate for the huge political and economic losses it has caused to the DPRK by totally stopping the construction of the LWRs and scrapping the AF [Agreed Framework],” it said in reference to the 1994 agreement.
Construction of the reactors, started as part of a 1994 deal dubbed the Agreed Framework, has been in limbo ever since Washington accused Pyongyang in October 2002 of violating the accord by running a separate nuclear programme.
The project was officially scrapped last month by the Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation (KEDO), the body formed to administer the light-water project and made up of the United States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union.
Under the Agreed Framework, North Korea promised to freeze its nuclear facilities in return for the construction of two light-water reactors at a cost of about five billion dollars.
The reactors are about one-third completed and more than one billion dollars has been sunk into the project.
At six-party talks in September aimed at resolving the rekindled nuclear confrontation, North Korea agreed in principle to dismantle its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for diplomatic and economic gains and security guarantees.
But at the last session in November it said US sanctions were blocking any progress at the talks involving the two Koreas, the United States, China, Japan and Russia.
A North Korean foreign ministry spokesperson said on Monday that North Korea would bolster its nuclear deterrent to counter a US bid to use the human rights issue as part of a drive to topple the communist regime.
North Korea said last week that six-party talks would be suspended indefinitely unless the United States lifts the sanctions. – AFP
