hankyoreh

The dismantlement of North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear facilities in North Pyongyan Province is a key issue in the second summit between North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and US President Donald Trump, which is now just eight days away. Despite claims that the facilities are dilapidated, Yongbyon is the center and symbol of North Korea’s nuclear development program. As such, it continues to be regarded as the first step in the North’s denuclearization process.

While North Korea is asking for sanctions to be relaxed or lifted as one of the key rewards for allowing the inspection and demolition of its Yongbyon facilities, the US’ reported position is that the North needs to do something that goes beyond dismantling Yongbyon before the US will ease or lift sanctions. Ultimately, many observers believe, the value of dismantling the Yongbyon facilities is likely to be one of the biggest questions for the two leaders to decide during their Hanoi summit. That’s why the Yongbyon nuclear facilities are drawing so much attention.

Yongbyon nuclear facilities

The tendency to refer to a single “Yongbyon nuclear facility” is misleading, since there are actually several nuclear-related facilities at the complex. At the present, there are reportedly more than 400 buildings in the complex. The complex is a self-contained production site that makes nuclear fuel rods and then reprocesses them into weapons-grade nuclear materials. During a meeting with reporters last month, a senior official in South Korea’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs who is familiar with North Korea and the US’ negotiations said that the Yongbyon nuclear facilities “carry a great deal of significance to the US as well. For a long time, Yongbyon was the center of the North’s entire nuclear program. Ending that through dismantlement would be significant progress toward complete denuclearization.”

The Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center, as the facilities are officially called, was first established in the early 1960s. A Soviet-built research reactor (an IRT-2000) was set up and began operations in 1965. The activation of a 5MWe nuclear reactor in 1986 fixed Yongbyon as the center of North Korea’s nuclear program.

The 5 MWe reactor that has presumably produced the majority of North Korea’s plutonium runs on processed uranium mined from North Korea’s rich deposits of naturally occurring uranium. After fueling the reactor, spent rods are reprocessed at the radiochemistry laboratory next door, which reportedly produces 6-7kg of weapons-grade plutonium each year. South Korea’s 2018 defense white paper estimated that North Korea has a stockpile of 50kg of plutonium.

The part of Yongbyon that currently attracts the most attention is the uranium enrichment facility, which North Korea made public in November 2010. At the time, North Korea invited experts including Siegfried Hecker, a renowned US nuclear physicist and today a senior fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University, to visit the facility, where they were shown 2,000 centrifuges capable of producing highly enriched uranium. Reports have confirmed that this facility was doubled in size in 2013. It has never been inspected by the international community.

The Yongbyon nuclear complex has been at the center of North Korea’s denuclearization process since the first North Korean nuclear crisis in 1993. Inconsistencies found by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in documents submitted by North Korea in 1992 led to high-level talks between North Korea and the US, which culminated in the Basic Agreement, signed in Geneva in 1994. This was the first time that the two sides agreed to freeze the 5MWe graphite moderated reactor and related facilities at Yongbyon and ultimately to dismantle the site.

Even afterwards, the cycle of operation and closure continued at the 5 MWe reactor, which was the key facility at Yongbyon. After US President George Bush halted oil shipments to North Korea and designated the North as a state sponsor of terrorism in 2002, the North countered by declaring an end to its freeze on nuclear activity. In 2007, Yongbyon was closed once again as a result of the Six-Party Talks. In 2008, the North submitted an 18,000 page nuclear report and a log of operations at Yongbyon to the US.

North Korea and the US’ final agreement to suspend nuclear operations at Yongbyon appeared in their Leap Day Deal, finalized on Feb. 29, 2012, in which the North agreed to a moratorium on uranium enrichment at Yongbyon and to IAEA inspections. The North reactivated its 5MWe reactor at Yongbyon in Apr. 2013, but operations at the reactor currently appear to be suspended.

If North Korea and the US embark on scrapping the Yongbyon complex as a result of the second North Korea-US summit, the first step is likely to be North Korea disclosing and freezing the agreed-upon facilities. The North has previously submitted such a report, but additional disclosure would be necessary for facilities that have been built since 2008, including the uranium enrichment facility.

Another decision that must be made is who will inspect the nuclear facilities, a task that was previously handled by IAEA inspectors. North Korea reportedly is extremely opposed to the IAEA’s involvement, and if it holds to that line, the inspectors may end up being drawn from the US or from the five nuclear-weapon states.

Experts suggest that a freeze of the nuclear facilities could begin by halting the insertion of fuel or by the removal that fuel. The next necessary steps would be shutting down operations, sealing up the facilities and installing surveillance equipment for monitoring. The two sides could also agree to “disablement” as an intermediate stage in dismantling the nuclear facilities, as they have in the past. Some argue that collecting and analyzing samples from the nuclear reactor and the uranium enrichment facilities are especially important this time around.

Another necessary step will be examining the entirety of North Korea’s nuclear industry, including the size of its uranium mines and their output history, the history of the reactor’s operation, the amount of spent nuclear fuel being produced and stored, and the size and output of the reprocessing facility. This would be the beginning of the long process of dismantling the Yongbyon nuclear facilities, and it’s unclear how much will be agreed to during the upcoming summit.

By Kim Ji-eun, staff reporter

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]