Word: seoul
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...1970s, South Korea ran a program to develop technology to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. By 1976, it was in the final stages of buying a reprocessing plant from France when the U.S. pressured Seoul to end the program. Washington suspected Korea wouldn't merely reprocess the fuel for power generation, but was planning to use the technology to make plutonium for atomic weapons. For Kim Chul, the nuclear expert who headed the project, the reprocessing dream never died. Kim keeps the only known copy of the project blueprints on a shelf in his study. "We should own that technology," says...
...Apparently, not completely, as revelations pouring out of Seoul this month have revealed. One centers around an idle TRIGA Mark III research reactor located in a dilapidated building in a residential suburb of Seoul. In the 1970s and '80s, the TRIGA Mark III was used by Korean nuclear scientists to test nuclear fuel and study isotopes. In April or May 1982, scientists took an irradiated test fuel rod from the reactor and placed it in one of the research installation's "hot cells," a room clad with lead to block radioactivity. Using robotic arms and peering through a leaded window...
...Last week, South Korea confessed to the 1982 plutonium experiment just a week after admitting its scientists had enriched a small amount of uranium in 2000 at a different facility in the city of Taejon, 120 km south of Seoul. The government went into strenuous spin mode, especially when accused of covering up the nuclear fiddling, a charge that was "groundless and unsubstantiated," according to the Foreign Ministry. But official explanations for how the nuclear materials got produced became more threadbare through the week. The uranium experiment in 2000 was supposedly carried out by a small group of very junior...
...That unlikely tale was Seoul's explanation last week for the startling news that its scientists had been caught enriching uranium?the very activity Washington is trying to get North Korea to halt. (Pyongyang also has a plutonium-based weapons program, the focus of continuing six-nation negotiations.) South Korea foreswore its nuclear weapons program in 1975, and has since been under the inspection regime of the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency. Last February, the government signed a protocol giving the IAEA the right to more information and to inspect sites anywhere in the country. Seoul had six months...
...There is no evidence that Seoul is trying to go nuclear, but the revelation couldn't have come at a more awkward time. "This incident is extremely unhelpful and damaging," says a Western diplomat in Vienna. He says Seoul must be dealt with sternly or countries like North Korea and Iran might reasonably object that they've been unfairly vilified for developing their own nuclear programs. Not surprisingly, Seoul is in serious spin mode. Across the DMZ, North Korea's Kim Jong Il must be enjoying a quiet chuckle at its expense...