SINGAPORE — When U.S. nuclear scientist Siegfried Hecker was taken to a new uranium- enrichment facility in North Korea's nuclear complex at Yongbyon last month, he was stunned by what he saw.
From an "astonishingly modern" control room at the plant, he looked down on neatly ordered arrays of 2,000 gas centrifuges. These high-speed spinning machines, each nearly two meters high and 20 centimeters in diameter, can be used to produce uranium fuel for nuclear power plants that generate electricity. They can also be adjusted to make the fissile cores of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons.
North Korean technicians showing Hecker and two colleagues the industrial-scale enrichment cascades housed in a building about 100 meters long insisted that the facility was configured to make low-enriched fuel for a small nuclear power reactor being built nearby. More at: http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/eo20101205mr.html
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