On Tuesday, it announced it would restart a plutonium reactor it had shut down in 2007.
Its announcement Tuesday that it would restart a plutonium reactor indicated that it intends to produce more nuclear weapons material.
Because North Korea has an HEU program, the logic goes, it is willing to negotiate away a rusting, above-ground plutonium reactor.
In a major and welcomed development, Russia announced that it will close its last weapons-grade plutonium production reactor.
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"If they really reactivate their (plutonium) reactor and expand whatever uranium enrichment capability they have and they go into business of making nuclear weapons by the dozen for their own purposes or for sale, we have a whole different ball game, " O'Hanlon told a seminar in Washington on Monday.
Reprocessing the recovery of plutonium from spent reactor fuel to make new fuel was conceived when plutonium was valuable.
This came close to exploding and blowing the plutonium-fuelled reactor to smithereens.
Russia also said it would shut down its last plutonium-producing reactor.
North Korea was no doubt keen to keep promised oil flowing over the winter, but work to disable its plutonium-producing reactor at Yongbyon another of Mr Kim's six-party obligations has now slowed too.
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This traded annual supplies of heavy fuel oil, and eventually two western-designed nuclear reactors, for North Korea's agreement to shut down its own plutonium-rich reactor, whose fuel rods could have been reprocessed into bomb cores.
This outfit is part of the scheme hatched by America, South Korea and Japan five years ago to wean North Korea off producing plutonium, with which nuclear weapons can be made, by offering to replace its plutonium-rich nuclear reactor with a pair of less proliferation-prone western-designed light-water reactors.
And the fast-breeder type of nuclear reactor in which plutonium was used as fuel is no longer economic.
He worked out, among other things, how to separate plutonium from uranium in a reactor after it had been synthesised.
As well as threatening to restart a mothballed nuclear reactor that produced plutonium for its weapons programme, Pyongyang also cut military and economic links with Seoul.
Just two years later, the Clinton administration threatened military strikes on the North when the U.S. and IAEA discovered that Pyongyang was diverting plutonium from its Yongbyon nuclear reactor for a secret atomic weapons program.
North Korea had agreed to disable the reactor that had produced plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Iran is also building a heavy-water reactor that could produce plutonium, another bomb ingredient.
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Tehran also is only a few years away from completing a reactor that will produce plutonium, another pathway to nuclear arms.
In nineteen eighty-one, Iraq was on the point of acquiring nuclear power. 10.17.01 Narrator The Osirak reactor was an experimental plutonium plant.
While it has depleted its stocks of "reactor-grade" plutonium needed to make the weapons-grade variety, the country has plentiful reserves of uranium ore.
If the deal goes through, it would pave the way to move to the third part of the Six Party Agreement, which requires North Korea to permanently dismantle its nuclear reactor and destroy its plutonium stockpile.
It also expelled the weapons inspectors who were monitoring its plutonium-laden spent fuel rods and a reactor capable of producing more that can be reprocessed into fissile material for nuclear bombs.
Yes I have seen the advocacy for Liquid Fluoride Thorium reactors and there are some apparent tantalizing advantages over current Uranium reactor designs like ability to burn plutonium as a starter fuel, less production of transuranics, higher fuel burn efficiencies, etc.
With plutonium no longer needed for use in the world's abandoned fast breeder reactor programmes and nuclear powers getting rid of their atomic weapons, large stockpiles of the highly toxic plutonium metal are starting to build up.
Under this approach, you build a reactor in plain sight, start producing plutonium, and wait for the U.S. to offer a deal.
Which allows them to extract plutonium from the fuel rods used in the light water reactor, the second one that was finished in 1998.
Not only did Assad's government enlist the help of North Korea to build a secret, illicit plutonium factory on the Euphrates (the nearly completed nuclear reactor destroyed by an Israeli air strike in September 2007).
The enrichment plants at Natanz, Qom and perhaps elsewhere give Iran an early route to HEU. A planned heavy-water reactor at Arak will produce large quantities of plutonium as a by-product, but will not be completed for some years.
The five-megawatt reactor was North Korea's only source of plutonium for its weapons program.
The five megawatt reactor was North Korea's only source of plutonium for its weapons program.
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