North Korea suspected of having more uranium-enrichment sites

Dec 14, 2010, 6:38 GMT

Seoul - The United States and South Korea suspect North Korea to be secretly operating more uranium-enrichment facilities, a South Korean newspaper reported Tuesday.

The Stalinist state last month showed a previously unknown uranium-enrichment facility at its Yongbyon nuclear complex to a visiting US expert.

'Yongbyon was not included in the list of three or four locations that Seoul and Washington had previously suspected,' the Chosun Ilbo newspaper quoted a South Korean intelligence official as saying. 'We understand that the North has long been conducting a uranium-enrichment experiment somewhere else.'

Uranium enriched to less than 20 per cent is used to fuel nuclear reactors, but it can be used to make bombs if enriched to a higher degree.

North Korean state media said the country was operating 'thousands' of centrifuges in Yongbyon, 100 kilometres north of Pyongyang. Siegfried Hecker, the US expert who visited the Yongbyon site, said he was shown hundreds of centrifuges and also voiced suspicions that parallel covert facilities existed.

Seoul and Washington suspect a research institute in central Pyongyang to house secret enrichment facilities as well as a missile base in Yanggang province, which lies on the Chinese border, and a cave complex in Kumchangri, about 160 kilometres north of Pyongyang.

The US administration fears that Pyongyang is seeking to build weapons with its enrichment programme, which was revealed days before the North shelled a South Korean island close to their contested maritime border in the Yellow Sea.

Four South Koreans were killed in the incident, which raised tensions on the peninsula.