Kim Jong Il may be dead, but his legacy in North Korea lives on through the nuclear program he left behind. New satellite images now offer a more detailed view of the work that went into North Korea’s nuclear facilities in Kim’s final years.
The satellite pictures and the simulated models based on them show that North Korea has made notable progress building out its uranium enrichment facilities and accompanying experimental light water reactor since 2009. That progress is noted in a new article by Siegfried Hecker, Robert Carlin and Niko Milonopoulos in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
In November 2010, Hecker and Carlin were part of a group of professors invited by North Korea to take a stroll through the country’s nuclear facilities at Yongbyon. To the group’s surprise, their hosts showed off what could be a new potential path to the bomb for the Hermit Kingdom: a recently-finished, gleaminguranium enrichment facility packed with 2,000 centrifuges. Prior to this point, the North’s route to nuclear weaponry had come from its plutonium reactor. Kim Jong Il and his minions swore the latest uranium enrichment facility was built only to provide fuel for an electricity-generating light water reactor. Nonetheless, it raised proliferation concerns since the enrichment facility could also be used to make the fuel for a nuclear weapon.
The pictures of the Yongbyon uranium enrichment facility published in the Bulletin show that the North Koreans have spruced up a number of buildings since June 2009. Hecker, Carlin and Milonopoulos can identify two of the structures in the photos. Building 4, the blue-roofed building in the photo below, houses the centrifuge facility that the North showed off back in 2010. The building in the lower left hand corner is a recreational facility for the staff.
The image of the enrichment facilities from April 2009 doesn’t match North Korea’s September 2009 announcement that it had successfully enriched uranium. When Hecker and Carlin visited the centrifuge facility (Building 4) in November 2010, the North Koreans claimed the recently retrofitted building had only been up and running for a few days. According to Hecker and his colleagues, whatever enrichment the North may have achieved in September 2009 had to have been at another site. The facilities in Building 4 simply weren’t ready to do the work at that time, raising the possibility of another clandestine enrichment site.
The photos show more progress on a nearby light water reactor (below) intended for electricity generation, the ostensible destination for the North’s enriched uranium. Hecker and his coauthors note quite a bit of progress on the facility’s exterior components. That tracks with the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s November 2011 claim that construction was “proceeding apace.” However, the authors say the more challenging work of constructing the interior will likely push back the reactor’s completion date past 2012. As the image below shows, the North Koreans have laid pipes to draw water from the nearby Kuryong River and done significant work on a turbine generator hall. The reactor’s containment dome is almost finished, too.
Safety is also an issue. In the satellite photos, North Korea is showing it can build a light water reactor. But Hecker, Carlin and Milonopoulos wonder aloud whether their ability to build and operate one without a nuclear accident is a different challenge altogether. LINK
Imagery: courtesy of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
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