N Korea secretly built new N-facility

Scientist Siegfried Hecker said in a report that he was taken during a recent trip to North

Korea’s main Yongbyon atomic complex to a facility with a small industrial-scale uranium enrichment facility.

He said the facility has 2,000 recently completed centrifuges and the North told him that it was producing low-enriched uranium meant for a new reactor.

Hecker, a Stanford University professor, wrote that his first glimpse of the new centrifuges was stunning. “Instead of seeing a few small cascades of centrifuges, which I believed to exist in North Korea, we saw a modern, clean centrifuge plant of more than a thousand centrifuges, all neatly aligned and plumbed below us,” he wrote.

He described the control room as “astonishingly modern”, writing that, unlike other North Korean facilities, it “would fit into any modern American processing facility.”

Hecker said the facilities appeared to be primarily for civilian nuclear power, not for North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. He said he saw no evidence of continued plutonium production at Yongbyon. But, he said, the uranium enrichment facilities “could be readily converted to produce highly enriched uranium bomb fuel.”