Korea restarts nuclear plant

NORTH KOREA yesterday said it had reactivated its nuclear facilities and is going ahead with their operation “on a normal footing”.

The communist country will use the facilities to generate electricity “at the present stage”, an unidentified North Korean foreign ministry spokesman said. His remarks were carried by the official KCNA news agency.

The North’s main nuclear facility at Yongbyon has been dormant since a 1994 deal with the United States, but it announced in December that it would revive it, amid a dispute with Washington.

The Yongbyon facility was the centre of a suspected nuclear weapons program in the 1990s.

“The DPRK is now putting the operation of its nuclear facilities for the production of electricity on a normal footing after their restart,” the spokesman said. DPRK stands for Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.

“The DPRK government has already solemnly declared that its nuclear activity would be limited to the peaceful purposes including the production of electricity at the present stage,” the spokesman said.

In Washington, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said he was unaware of the reports.

US officials and nuclear experts say the amount of electricity that North Korea can produce at its nuclear facilities is negligible.

The North Korean spokesman criticised US efforts to bring the nuclear dispute to the UN Security Council, saying the standoff over Pyongyang’s nuclear ambitions is between the North and the United States only.

“If the UN Security Council responsible for the issue of world peace and security does not call the US wrong Korean policy to task, this organisation will turn out to be partial and the DPRK will, accordingly, not recognise it,” the spokesman said.

North Korea, which often accuses Washington of plotting to invade it, said in December that it would reactivate a five-megawatt Soviet-designed reactor that was frozen under a 1994 energy deal with Washington.

The facilities at Yongbyon include a building that stores 8,000 spent fuel rods and a reprocessing laboratory, where the North Koreans can extract weapons-grade plutonium from the spent fuel rods.

Last week, US officials said spy satellites have detected covered trucks apparently taking on cargo at the storage facility where spent nuclear fuel rods are stored.

If the rods are processed, enough plutonium can be extracted to make several nuclear weapons, US officials have said.