Are North Korean fertilizer factories producing uranium for bombs?
Fertilizer factories that North Korea has been building to boost agriculture remain among its priority projects, but a new US study says the plants may be dual-use facilities that Pyongyang is utilising to secretly extract uranium for its nuclear weapons programme.
‘Several states have succeeded in extracting “yellowcake” uranium from phosphoric acid as part of the phosphate fertilizer production process,’ said Margaret Croy, a researcher at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey in California. North Korea ‘has both the means and motivation to undertake such work, thus significantly altering existing open-source assessments of how much yellowcake uranium North Korea could produce annually, which in turn affects estimates of how many nuclear warheads DPRK can make,’ she writes in the study.
Croy said there is ample rationale for Pyongyang to pursue this method of uranium extraction, adding that: ‘The dual usage of existing infrastructure would both conceal the activity and make it more difficult for international audiences to positively identify and condemn.’
NKPRO, which reports on news from North Korea, said in December that satellite imagery had shown a large new fertilizer plant north of Pyongyang appeared to be near completion. It said the plant was one of the country’s ‘top-priority construction projects.’
‘The Sunchon Phosphate Fertilizer Factory… is being built with the official aim of “increasing the agricultural production” of the country, though it could serve as a production base for other chemicals as well,’ the website said at the time.
https://www.nonproliferation.org/op-47-dual-use-in-the-dprk/
