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from the North Korea affairs website 38 North on Sep. 15. (Yonhap News)

With North Korea hinting on Sep. 15 that it would carry out a nuclear test, attention is turning once again to the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, North Korea’s primary facility for developing nuclear weapons.

The Yongbyon facility, located in Yongbyon County, North Pyongan Province, has a nuclear reactor and the reprocessing and enrichment equipment used to extract the plutonium and uranium required to manufacture nuclear weapons.

Along with generating 5 megawatts of electricity, the reactor at Yongbyon doubles as a site for experiments. Spent fuel rods are reprocessed at the reactor to extract plutonium, which is then used in the manufacture of nuclear weapons. Reportedly, the facility is able to extract 6 kilograms of plutonium a year – enough to make one nuclear weapon.

Certain parts were removed from the Yongbyon reactor to prevent it from being restored to its original state in less than a year after a number of accords, including the joint statement in the six-party talks on Sep. 19, 2005, the agreement on Feb. 13, 2007, and the disablement agreement on Oct. 3, 2007. North Korea demolished the cooling tower, which was a symbol of the reactor, in June 2008.

But after a dispute over North Korea’s launch of a long-range rocket in 2009 and subsequent sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council, North Korea announced that it would resume reprocessing. At the end of August of that year, North Korea announced that it had finished reprocessing around 8,000 spent fuel rods, implying that it had extracted plutonium from them.

And then in Nov. 2010, North Korea disclosed for the first time the 2,000 uranium centrifuges that were located in the nuclear facility at Yongbyon to an expert from the US. This was when North Korea revealed that it had the ability to make not only plutonium but also uranium bombs. These centrifuges are thought to be able to produce enough highly enriched uranium each year to make one or two nuclear bombs.

Experts also think it is very likely that North Korea is operating secret uranium enrichment facilities in areas other than Yongbyon.

After taking power, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un decided during a full session of the Central Committee of the Korean Workers’ Party in Mar. 2013 to adopt a two-track course of building the economy and developing nuclear weapons. On Apr. 2 of the same year, he announced measures to repair and restart the reactor and other nuclear facilities at Yongbyon.

If the reactor was repaired at that point and reactivated

six to twelve months later, North Korea presumably extracted enough plutonium to make one or two more nuclear weapons.

“North Korea is estimated to possess around 40 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium, and it is thought to be running a program to produce highly enriched uranium (HEU),” the South Korean Defense Ministry said in a 2014 white paper.

“The view of scholars is that that much plutonium

would be enough to make between seven and ten nuclear weapons,” said Lee Chun-geun, senior analyst at the Science and Technology Policy Institute.

By Kim Ji-hoon, staff reporter

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