Free Republic

BEIJING – North Korea is planning to unload fuel rods at its Yongbyon reactor within the next three months in what would be a significant boost to its nuclear weapons capability, an American scholar said Saturday. During a meeting this past week in Pyongyang, Selig Harrison said that North Korean Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan told him that the communist nation would unload the rods “beginning this fall, and no later than the end of the year.” Removing the fuel rods is “a significant new development because it underlines that North Korea is enhancing its weapons capability,” Harrison, director...

By NASSER KARIMI, Associated Press Writer 15 minutes ago TEHRAN, Iran - Iran is producing fuel rods for nuclear reactors, state radio reported Thursday in the government‘s latest attempt to boost a nuclear program that world powers are trying to curb. "After sanctions from the U.S., experts from Iran‘s atomic energy organization have produced better quality rods than the foreign samples," the radio reported. Enriched uranium can be used in the production of nuclear energy or weapons. Iran, a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, insists its nuclear program is aimed only at producing electricity. But the United States, France...

TOKYO, Aug. 21 (Yonhap) -- North Korea began operating its nuclear reactor just before the fourth round of six-party talks on ending the North's nuclear weapons ambitions started in late July, Japan's Asahi Shimbun reported Sunday. In a dispatch from Washington, Asahi said North Korea resumed operations at its 5,000-kilowatt nuclear plant in Yongbyon in July, merely months after it announced that activities at the plant had been suspended in order to remove spent fuel rods out of it for reprocessing. Asahi quoted U.S. officials as saying that intelligence satellites had detected water vapor being released from the plant's...

North Korea said Wednesday it had completed removing spent nuclear fuel rods from a reactor at its main nuclear complex. A North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman said they had "successfully completed" removing 8,000 fuel rods from the reactor at Yongbyon, in a statement carried by the North's official Korean Central News Agency. Removing the rods would allow the North to reprocess them to extract weapons-grade plutonium. But the North didn't say Wednesday it would take such a step.

An Iraqi defector has given Pentagon officials a detailed inside look at Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein's biological and chemical weapons programs — and told of buying nuclear materials with a briefcase full of $100 bills. The defector, whose story is recounted in the new edition of Vanity Fair magazine, says he was involved in the most sensitive of Iraq's secret arms programs before fleeing a year and a half ago. Presented to U.S. officials by the Iraqi National Congress, a London-based exile group pushing for an American attack on Iraq, the defector says Saddam is close to finishing a...

Two pieces of a highly radioactive fuel rod are missing from a Vermont nuclear plant, and engineers planned to search onsite for the nuclear material, officials said Wednesday. The fuel rod was removed in 1979 from the Vermont Yankee reactor, which is currently shut down for refueling and maintenance. Remote-control cameras will be used to search a spent fuel pool on the property, officials said. "We do not think there is a threat to the public at this point. The great probability is this material is still somewhere in the pool," said Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Neil Sheehan. But Sheehan...

US wakes up to Osama's nuke dreams CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA TIMES NEWS NETWORK ASHINGTON: Alarm bells are clanging in the US and other western establishments over reports that Osama Bin Laden may have acquired or developed crude atom bombs with help from renegade Pakistani nuclear scientists. Accounts of Bin Laden's pursuit of nuclear weapons has been in the air for some time, but they acquired an added urgency this week following the arrest in Islamabad of two retired Pakistani nuclear scientists whose activities in Afghanistan were being scrutinised by western intelligence agencies. The scientists were reportedly taken into custody for questioning ...

AP News Alert SEOUL, South Korea (AP) -- North Korea says it has processed all of its 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods and is using plutonium to make bombs. Copyright 2003 Associated Press. All rights reserved. MORE

July 15, 2003 North Korea Says It Has Made Fuel for Atom Bombs By DAVID E. SANGER WASHINGTON, July 14 ?North Korean officials told the Bush administration last week that they had finished producing enough plutonium to make a half-dozen nuclear bombs, and that they intended to move ahead quickly to turn the material into weapons, senior American officials said today. The new declaration set off a scramble in American intelligence agencies ? under fire for their assessment of Iraq's nuclear capability ?to determine if the North Korean government of Kim Jong Il was bluffing or had succeeded in producing...

N. Korea informed U.S. that it finished reprocessing spent fuel rods. N. Korea told U.S. on July 8, 2003, that it finished reprocessing 8,000 spent fuel rods at Yong-byun nuclear facilities in N. Korea, according to the former (S. Korean) legislator Chang Sung-min(MDP) who was told about this from a high-level source in Washington, D.C. on July 12, 2003. He was told that, on July 8, in New York, N. Korea had unofficial working-level meeting with America. At this meeting, N. Korea informed America that the reprocessing of 8,000 spent fuel rods was complete on June 30, 2003, and that...

Report: N. Korea takes nuclear step U.S. intelligence: Evidence suggests Pyongyang is reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods July 11 — Air samples collected near North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facility contain the first physical evidence that North Korea has begun reprocessing spent nuclear fuel rods. NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski reports. July 11 — North Korea has begun to reprocess spent nuclear fuel rods — a critical step to produce more nuclear weapons — an intelligence report delivered to the White House on Thursday suggests, NBC News has learned. U.S. GOVERNMENT officials tell NBC News that air samples collected from the vicinity of...

North Korea has recently tested devices used to trigger atomic explosives 70 times, according to the country neighbor South Korea.And the country has confirmed that the North has reprocessed some of its 8,000 spent Nuclear Fuel Rods.Since April, North Korea had claimed that it had all but finished reprocessing the 8,000 rods, but until now both US and South Korean officials have doubted the claim.Expert say that if the rods were reprocessed they could yield enough plutoninum for several atomic bombs 'within months.'The South's Intelligence Agency said that the devices were tested at Yongduk-dong, some 25 miles northwest of Yongbyon,...

N Korea nuclear claim 'hushed up' By David Rennie in Washington and Hannah Cleaver in Berlin (Filed: 28/04/2003) A "poisonous" row is brewing in Washington over allegations that diplomats knew for weeks that North Korea claimed to be reprocessing nuclear fuel rods but hushed the matter up for fear of derailing peace talks. The world first knew of North Korean claims to be processing weapons-grade plutonium 10 days ago when the isolated Stalinist regime issued a statement saying it had told America in March about the reprocessing. That statement was initially dismissed as an error. But angry American officials told...

Hungary's only nuclear reactor at Paks, has been leaking radioactive gas since April 10, claim "no damage to the environment", as a result of an incident rated level 3, highest, before it is classified an accident. 30 fuel rods were seriously damaged. The damage was traced back to cooling insufficiency, malfunctioning of cooling equipment made by French-German company. This info is in two separate articles, but above was the summary. Here are the two articles, both by Reuters: ============= BUDAPEST, April 18 (Reuters) - Hungary's only nuclear plant said on Friday traces of radioactive gas had leaked into the atmosphere...

American Spy Satellites over North Korea have detected what appear to be trucks moving the country's stockpile of 8,000 nuclear fuel rods out of storage, prompting fears within the Bush administration that North Korea is preparing to produce roughly a half dozen nuclear weapons, American officials said today.Throughout January, intelligence analyists have seen extensive activity at the Yongbyon nuclear complex, with some trucks pulling up to the building housing the storage pond.While the satellites could not see exactly what was being put into the trucks, analysts concluded that it was likely the workers were transporting the rods to another site,...

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his associates in the political-security leadership promise that the American offensive against Iraq will solve Israel's problems. Hostile regimes in the region will collapse, Yasser Arafat will be replaced by a more palatable leadership and dollars from the United States will end the economic crisis. If we wait for the "day after," Sharon believes, we will awaken to a new reality, one in which the Arabs fear Israel's American-backed power. Waiting, however, comes with a price. The lengthy preparations for the war on Iraq suggest that even the world's superpower finds it hard to chew...