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IAEA finishes inspections

UN inspectors left yesterday after a week-long investigation into South Korea's past secret nuclear experiments with uranium and plutonium, officials said.

A five-member team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) launched the inspections Monday at the state-run Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute in Daejeon, 160km south of Seoul.

Two of the five inspectors visited another nuclear research center in a northern part of Seoul Thursday while one of them toured an abandoned uranium mine at Goesan, 150km south of the capital, on Friday.

The inspectors spent Saturday mostly in documenting what they had looked into or sampled from their field work.

"The IAEA inspectors left the country for Vienna today as scheduled after wrapping up their latest investigation here," an official of the institute told reporters.

A first team of IAEA inspectors visited South Korean nuclear facilities earlier this month after Seoul revealed that its scientists secretly enriched a tiny amount of plutonium in 1982 and uranium in 2000.

South Korea says the lab experiments were not linked to nuclear weapons programs. IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei, however, expressed "serious concern" about the activities.

The inspectors are expected to report back to the Vienna-based IAEA by November, according to officials in Seoul.

South Korea has made a fresh pledge that it would not develop or possess nuclear weapons, but would pursue research transparently.

The case, however, has already damaged multinational efforts to persuade Stalinist North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program.

The North has said it would not attend multilateral talks on its nuclear program unless South Korea clears up suspicions over its own nuclear experiments.

South Korea said its scientists produced 150km of uranium metal in 1982 in undeclared activities and a small amount of this was used in 2000 to produce a microscopic amount of enriched uranium.

The scientists also admitted to having extracted a miniscule amount of plutonium from 2.5kg of fuel rods in secret research in 1982.

South Korea has the world's sixth-largest civilian nuclear industry, operating 19 power plants that produce 40 percent of the country's energy needs.
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