Print

Mail

wiki links

N Korea claims reactor closed

North Korea confirmed it has shut its nuclear reactor that provides the secretive state with material to make weapons-grade plutonium, China's Xinhua news agency quoted a North Korean official as saying yesterday.

North Korea told the US it has shut down its Soviet-era Yongbyon reactor as part of a disarmament deal, the US State Department said on Saturday after a team of UN nuclear inspectors arrived in Pyongyang.

"We have shut down the nuclear facilities at Yongbyon after we received the first shipment of heavy oil," the North's KCNA news agency cited one of its spokesman as saying, according to Xinhua's English news Web site.

North Korea said last week it would consider suspending the operation of its nuclear facilities as soon as it received the first shipment of oil from South Korea under a Feb. 13 aid-for-disarmament deal.

A South Korean tanker carrying 6,200 tonnes of fuel oil docked on Saturday at a port in northeastern North Korea.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said in Washington that US negotiators looked forward to the next step of the Feb. 13 agreement, in which Pyongyang "has committed to declaring all its nuclear programs and disabling all its existing nuclear facilities."

North Korea conducted its first nuclear test in October 2006.

The chief US nuclear envoy said yesterday the world needs to watch North Korean moves cautiously as UN inspectors start verifying whether Pyongyang has shut down its main nuclear reactor.

"We need to caution everybody that this is just the first step," US envoy Christopher Hill said early yesterday, noting that Pyongyang had informed the US mission to the UN of the shutdown.

"This is only a meaningful step in so far as it will be followed by other steps," said Hill, who has spent years in negotiations over the North Korean nuclear program.

He said the UN inspection team should get reports later yesterday on the exact situation at Yongbyon.

"I think by the end of today they will be able to give us reports on the five facilities," he said as he left the resort town of Hakone southwest of Tokyo.

South Korea's Foreign Ministry hailed Pyongyang's decision as an encouraging development.

"North Korea's measures to shut down the Yongbyon nuclear reactor and accept the IAEA inspectors are meaningful because it is the first step in implementing their denuclearization agreement," a ministry statement said.

Word of the reactor shutdown came on the day the IAEA team reached Pyongyang.

The leader of the team had said earlier in Beijing they would go straight to Yongbyon on Saturday to begin work at the complex, which produces weapons-grade plutonium.

The team of 10 experts is the first to return to monitor the shutdown after a four-and-a-half-year absence.

IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei has said it would take about a month to set up the monitoring equipment.

"I am quite optimistic that this is a good step in the right direction," he said.

In his statement, McCormack said: "We, along with all our other six-party partners, remain firmly committed to achieving the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula."

The six-party talks, where North Korea sits down with the US, South Korea, China, Japan and Russia, are due to resume on Wednesday to map out the next stage of the disarmament process.

The five have promised North Korea massive economic aid and better diplomatic ties for scrapping its nuclear arms program.

"How smoothly the rest of the operation will go very much depends on how progress will be made in the six-party talks," ElBaradei said. "It is going to be a long process."

US nuclear envoy Hill told Japanese media on Saturday he expected North Korea to produce a list of all its nuclear facilities in the coming weeks or months.
This story has been viewed 1179 times.