hankyoreh

former Deputy Director-General for Safeguards of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency

By Kim Kyu-won, staff reporter

It is expected that it will take North Korea four to six months to reactivate the Yongbyon nuclear reactor. This is much shorter than the one year that the South Korean government and experts had previously predicted, and it means that the North could be able to bring the reactor back online by the second half of 2013.

“It will take North Korea from four to six months to reactivate [the nuclear reactor],” said Olli Heinonen, former Deputy Director-General for Safeguards of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in an interview with Voice of America on Apr. 3. “Just as it did in Syria, North Korea can make modifications to the reactor without rebuilding the cooling tower that it blew up in Jun. 2008.”

The remark about “modifications to the reactor” is understood to refer to the method of building the reactor underground and using river water as the coolant. This is the method that North Korea used when it assisted in the construction of the al-Kibar nuclear reactor in Syria.

Heinonen believes that if the Yongbyon nuclear reactor comes back online this fall, North Korea will be able to extract 6kg of plutonium by the end of 2014. This would be enough plutonium to build a single nuclear weapon. He also predicted that the reactivated Yongbyon reactor would be able to produce one bomb‘s worth of plutonium each year. If these predictions come to pass, North Korea will become a country that produces both plutonium and highly enriched uranium, both of which can be used as fuel to make nuclear weapons.

It is estimated that the centrifuges set up by North Korea in 2010 can produce 40kg of highly enriched uranium each year, or enough to make two nuclear weapons. North Korea also seems to have reprocessed spent nuclear fuel rods since 2002 and extracted 40kg of plutonium, which would be enough for seven nuclear bombs.

“While North Korean officials told US nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker in Nov. 2010 that it was operating 2000 centrifuges, I suspect that it is also operating uranium enrichment facilities in places other than Yongbyon,” Heinonen added.

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