Expert worries over N. Korea nuke plant
Secretive North Korea is making rapid progress in building a uranium-fuelled reactor that poses an alarming safety risk, a nuclear expert said on Thursday.
Siegfried Hecker, who has visited the North’s main Yongbyon nuclear facility four times since 2004 and was the last foreign expert to visit the site in late 2010, said he was very concerned the reactor could be technically flawed.
“In spite of their industrial difficulties they have continued to build it at a good pace,” he told Reuters in a telephone interview from Stanford University in the United States.
“What alarms me is that I have never had the sense they had the sufficient regulatory oversight in order to be able to build this thing safely, and operate it safely,” he said, adding the lightwater reactor could be operational in two years. “From a technical standpoint, they should not proceed with the completion of the reactor and operate it on the basis of lack of connection with the international safety community. That is just too high of a risk.”
A series of satellite images taken over the past year were proof that the impoverished state was serious about finishing the reactor, Hecker said, even as it struggled to feed millions of its undernourished population.