N Korea builds plant to enrichuranium

IN secret and with remarkable speed, North Korea has built a new, highly sophisticated facility to enrich uranium, according to an American nuclear scientist, raising fears that the North is ramping up its atomic programme despite international pressure.

The scientist, Siegfried Hecker, said in a report posted on Saturday that he was taken during a recent trip to the North’s main Yongbyon atomic complex to a small industrial-scale uranium enrichment facility. It had 2,000 recently completed centrifuges, he said, and the North told him it was producing low-enriched uranium meant for a new reactor. He described his first glimpse of the new centrifuges as “stunning.”

Hecker, a former director of the US Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory who is regularly given rare glimpses of the North’s secretive nuclear programme, acknowledged it was not clear what North Korea stood to gain by showing him the formerly secret area.