Word: uranium
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...South Korea is not allowed to make plutonium or enriched uranium, the two fuels for nuclear bombs, under its nonproliferation commitments, and the procedure carried out in 1982 would have had few other purposes. "It is something which is pretty exclusively reserved for finding out about plutonium," says a Geneva-based diplomat. It's also a procedure that's hard to cover up?although South Korea appears to have tried. The Ministry of Science and Technology says it reported the experiment to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in 1983, but its report had a significant error. South Korea told...
...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...
...handful of scientists at a government-run South Korean nuclear research institute were experimenting with a gun that blasts laser beams at elements like gadolinium. The experiments weren't successful and the scientists decided to dismantle the equipment. But before they did, somebody suggested using the laser to enrich uranium?a process that produces the fuel for one type of nuclear bomb. "Scientists are full of curiosity," explains Chang In Soon, president of the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, where the experiment took place. "They're interested in this kind of thing...
...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...
...Thursday, a Science and Technology Ministry spokesman admitted that scientists there produced 0.2 grams of enriched uranium in 2000. (At least 10 kilos are needed to fuel a weapon.) Late last week, the government said it wasn't sure whether it had violated its nonproliferation commitments...