NORTH KOREA’S ENRICHMENT PROGRAM

SCIENTIST: NKOREA BUILDS NEW NUCLEAR FACILITY

AP, November 21, 2010

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korea has secretly and quickly built a new, highly sophisticated facility to enrich uranium, according to an American nuclear scientist, raising fears that the North is ramping up its atomic program despite international pressure.

The scientist, Siegfried Hecker, said in a report posted Saturday that he was taken during a recent trip to the North's main Yongbyon atomic complex to a facility with a small industrial-scale uranium enrichment facility. The facility had 2,000 recently completed centrifuges, he said, and the North told him it was producing low-enriched uranium meant for a new reactor.

Hecker, a former director of the U.S. Los Alamos Nuclear Laboratory who is regularly given rare glimpses of the North's secretive nuclear program, acknowledged that it was not clear what North Korea stood to gain by showing him the formerly secret area.

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