Oh, I’m not talking about Iran. They told everyone, including the IAEA, that they were going to enrich uranium. To date, Iran has only produced a minicule amount of low enriched uranium, the kind used in civilian nuclear power plants:
Iran has enriched uranium to 4.8 per cent but will not enrich above 5 per cent, the head of its atomic energy body said on Tuesday, keeping the country’s enrichment work within a range used for nuclear power stations.
No, the international bad boy I’m referring to, the country that secretly enriched uranium to near bomb grade levels, is none other than — South Korea.
More after the fold . . .
I know that sounds a little hard to believe. South Korea is, after all, our ally and a party to the NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty). They’re one of the good guys. South Koreans (unlike their cousins to the North) are a peace-loving people. They’d never operate a clandestine nuclear weapons program.
Or so we thought until this happened:
The U.N. nuclear watchdog confirmed in a confidential report on Thursday that South Korea enriched a tiny amount of uranium in 2000 to a level close to what would be useable in an atomic weapon.
A senior diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) also said a senior government scientist, the president of the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute in Taejon, South Korea, had authorized the experiments with the uranium and knew about work with plutonium, also useable in nuclear weapons.
[…]
South Korea also denied that any bomb-grade uranium had been found. But the IAEA confirmed the scientists had enriched a small amount of uranium to 77 percent uranium-235, the atom needed in large quantities in weapons. Bombs with uranium fuel usually have cores enriched to at least 80 to 90 percent. […]
The IAEA said that the scientists had produced 0.7 grammes of plutonium.
[…]
The IAEA praised South Korea for its “active cooperation” but said that it still needed detailed documentation of the uranium enrichment and plutonium separation activities in order to complete its investigation.
However, the IAEA said that South Korea had refused repeated requests to take samples at some of its nuclear facilities. Seoul did not acknowledge its plutonium separation experiment, conducted in 1982, until March 2003 despite repeated questioning by the IAEA about plutonium particles found at sites.
Some diplomats in Vienna say South Korea’s concealment of its plutonium and uranium experiments were a violation of Seoul’s obligations under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which could require the IAEA board of governors to refer the matter to the U.N. Security Council.
Not good. Experiments which produced plutonium and heighly enriched uranium both. The stuff that atomic bombs are made of. And to top it all off, they actively hid these programs from the IAEA. Clearly a violation of their obligations under the NPT.
So, was this breach of the NPT by a technologically advanced rogue state referred to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions? Did John Bolton and the Bush administration rant and rave about the danger that Seoul’s nuclear program posed to the security of the world, and threaten military intervention if the Security Council failed to act?
Well . . . not exactly. The IAEA did investigate, but everyone involved decided further action wasn’t necessary. South Korea got a mild slap on the wrist, but essentially escaped unscathed, despite the fact that its secret nuclear experiments, experiments that began in the 1980’s, were far more advanced than those that Iran is now conducting. “Just how advanced?”, you ask. Take a look:
On October 21, 2004, South Korea told the IAEA that it had conducted a chemical enrichment experiment in 1979-1981 that it had not previously declared as required under its safeguards agreement.
[…]
A decade later, South Korea began to apply laser separation technology to uranium. This activity built on elementary laser research undertaken in the 1960s and molecular laser isotope separation technology development in the 1970s and 1980s, obtained with Russian and American technical assistance. In 1990, South Korea began to develop atomic vapor laser isotope separation (AVLIS) technology involving small, solid-state, high-power lasers that could enrich uranium. KAERI researchers first applied AVLIS to non-fissile materials and later to uranium. [4]
In 1990, researchers also began spectroscopic work with uranium. From 1993 to 2000 at least 10 AVLIS-related experiments involving depleted uranium or undeclared natural uranium were conducted. In 1993-1994, KAERI conducted a uranium evaporation test involving imported depleted uranium. This was followed in 1994-1996 by spectroscopic experiments with depleted and natural uranium metal.
Finally, in January, February, and May 2000, KAERI conducted AVLIS experiments using domestically produced undeclared uranium metal. The scientists separated one-fifth of a gram of uranium enriched to an average of 10.2 percent uranium 235.
The equipment used in these experiments was dismantled and stored at KAERI for future disposal, ostensibly because it was “contaminated”–a rationale we view with skepticism. Some of this dismantled equipment is now used for non-nuclear, stable isotope separation research.
[…]
The uranium used in these experiments came from a 3.5-kilogram sample of a 154-kilogram stock of uranium metal that KAERI produced in 1982 at its Taejon facility. This stock seems to have come from two separate sources. The first was uranium metal extracted from phosphate fertilizer (about 2.5 metric tons of ammonium uranyl tricarbonate) rather than from refined uranium ore. The Ministry of Science and Technology (MOST) announced on September 14, 2004 that a private company, Yong-Nam Chemicals, imported the uranium-bearing phosphate fertilizer and declared to the IAEA that about 100 kilograms of uranium oxide was recovered and that this was the sole source of the uranium used in the AVLIS experiments. South Korea also declared that it obtained another 25 kilograms from uranium ore from a coal mine in Goesan.
But 125 kilograms would have been insufficient to produce 150 kilograms of uranium metal. Moreover, the IAEA has found that samples of uranium said to be from the Goesan mine are depleted relative to the amount of uranium 235 expected in natural uranium–yet another anomaly for South Korea to explain. The depleted uranium could only have come from imported uranium from which the uranium 235 had been removed. Reconciling these disparities will be complicated further because two laboratories (and a third that produced depleted uranium) were dismantled in 1994.
We believe that KAERI bought about 900 kilograms of natural uranium from Yong-Nam Chemicals; 700 kilograms were fabricated into fresh fuel for the Wolsung 1 CANDU natural uranium reactor, and two KAERI laboratories fabricated 154 kilograms of natural uranium metal from which the 3.5 kilograms were taken. Some 50 kilograms appear to have been lost.
KAERI retains 133 kilograms of the natural uranium metal. If 3.5 kilograms were consumed in making the enriched uranium sample, a discrepancy of about 14 kilograms remains. KAERI claims that it was mixed into the depleted uranium metal that was produced at KAERI in the mid-1980s. No doubt the IAEA will investigate this discrepancy.
[…]
KAERI did not report the enrichment experiments to MOST until late June 2004. It seems that KAERI officials thought they could conceal the experiments because the amount of enriched uranium was so small. Responding to our inquiries, KAERI officials and the hands-on researchers admit that they knew they were required to report their activities to MOST–and that MOST would then be required to report them to the IAEA–but they went ahead anyway.
[…]
It appears that KAERI officials had been concerned for years that it would be difficult to keep the uranium and earlier plutonium-related experiments secret once the Additional Protocol came into force. Sampling would inevitably yield traces of undeclared activities, just as occurred at Yongbyon in North Korea more than a decade ago.
In November 1997, the IAEA detected two particles of slightly irradiated depleted uranium with plutonium in samples taken from hot cells associated with the TRIGA III research reactor in Seoul. In December 1999, the IAEA asked South Korea about this indicator of undeclared plutonium separation activity, but South Korea did not acknowledge that separation had taken place. On December 10, 2002, the IAEA requested permission to visit KAERI’s Laser Technology Center in Taejon, a request repeated on April 1, 2003. Finally, a year later, South Korea told the IAEA that plutonium separation had in fact occurred at the TRIGA III hot cell.
And here’s what the official report by the IAEA found regarding this previously undisclosed program:
According to ElBaradei’s report, South Korea told the IAEA in August that it used the atomic vapor laser isotope separation (AVLIS) method to conduct “laboratory scale” experiments involving “relatively small” amounts of uranium. This technology uses lasers to separate the fissionable uranium-235 isotope from vaporized uranium. “Enriched” uranium has a concentration of uranium-235 greater than the approximate 1 percent concentration that occurs naturally.
The report adds that, in 2000, South Korean scientists at the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI) produced 200 milligrams of enriched uranium. While the average enrichment level was about 10 percent uranium-235, some levels reached up to 77 percent—a level theoretically sufficient for a nuclear weapon. Most civilian power plants use fuel with a concentration of less than 20 percent uranium-235.
Just the sort of thing that would give other countries in the region cause for concern. South Korea used a far more advanced technological approach to enrich uranium, and achieved higher levels of enrichment, than anything Iran is currently capable of with its more primitive centrifuge technology. Nonetheless, South Korea has been allowed to skate free, despite concerns expressed in the IAEA report that many questions still remain about it’s “nuclear experiments.”
Of course, if the Bush administration was really concerned about nuclear non-proliferation it wouldn’t have made the deal with India regarding the export of nuclear technology and material that Bush announced during his trip there earlier this year. So its no surprise that South Korea’s recent contretemps was essentially ignored by the US and papered over by the IAEA.
Still you have to wonder who is the bigger threat to produce nuclear weapons in the near future: Iran, with its limited abilities to enrich uranium to levels not exceeding 5%, or South Korea with its far more advanced program that has already demonstrated the ability to produce weapons grade bomb material?
What there can be no question about, however, is which country will be hyped as the bigger threat, and which will be threatened with a military attack by US forces.
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
