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Energy partners kill reactor project

North Korea's demand that it be given light-water nuclear reactors before it would open up to atomic inspections and disarmament got a sharp rebuff as the partners in an energy consortium agreed with US policy and terminated the reactor-building project.

It took almost two years for Washington to wear down the resistance of its partners in the New York-based Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization (KEDO), with South Korea finally giving up the partly built light-water reactor last summer. Japan and the EU had already sided with the US "no carrot" policy.

On Tuesday, the executive board of KEDO concluded a two-day private meeting and the US, South Korean, Japanese and EU delegates issued no formal statement.

But on his way out of the building's New York office, US Ambassador Joseph DiTrani said the KEDO partners had reached consensus on the "termination" of the light-water reactor project, KEDO spokesman Brian Kremer confirmed.

The decade-old light-water reactor project had been mothballed for the last two years, kept barely alive in case North Korea showed signs of resuming International Atomic Energy Agency inspections and liquidating its ambitious self-proclaimed nuclear weapons program.

But with a Nov. 30 deadline looming on major contracts underlying the US$4.6 billion project -- notably to the prime South Korean contractor, Korean Electric Power Co (KEPCO) -- time, money and political will had all evaporated.

Only last week, at a summit of Asian and Pacific leaders in South Korea, US President George W. Bush said: "We'll consider the light-water reactor at the appropriate time. The appropriate time is after they have verifiably given up their nuclear weapons, and/or program."

The decision comes at a particularly delicate moment in the fitful series of six-nation talks aimed at disarming North Korea. The fifth round of talks among the two Koreas, the US, Russian, China and Japan ended on Nov. 11 without signs of any major progress.

Charles Kartman, the American who was executive director of KEDO from 2001 until this August, when the Bush administration pushed him into retirement, said North Korea must have anticipated KEDO's demise.

"There's no surprise here for North Korea. They've been setting up their obstacles" for weeks and in September had revived their demand for the reactors, Kartman said.

At the end of the fourth round of six-way talks in September, North Korea pledged in principle to disarm but maintained that it would need light-water reactors to provide electricity beforehand. Fulfilling that demand would postpone effective disarmament for several years.

Meanwhile, North Korea says it is escalating its nuclear weapons development program, the problem that spiked both Korean crises in recent years -- in 1993 and last year, and again in 2002 through today.

A shutdown of the Yongbyon research reactor in 1989 and reactor slowdowns in 1990 and 1991 are believed to have yielded enough plutonium to build two or three bombs, a situation that the Clinton administration considered so threatening that it brought the US and North Korea close to war in 1994.
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