South Korean officials inspect unused fuel rods stacked in a warehouse at North Korea's nuclear complex in Yongbyon in January, 2009. UN nuclear inspectors have left North Korea after the hardline Stalinist state ordered them out and announced plans to restart production of weapons-grade plutonium. (AFP/South Korean Foreign Ministry/File)From The Washington Post:
TOKYO, April 15 -- Despite its defiant vow to restart a plant that makes plutonium, North Korea's capacity to add to its small nuclear arsenal is limited by aging technology and by machinery that was disabled as part of a disarmament deal.
Using fuel rods now in storage, the North could process enough plutonium for one nuclear weapon within six months, according to expert assessments.
But it would take 6 to 12 months to restart all facilities at the Yongbyon nuclear plant, and its capacity to produce plutonium is limited to about one bomb's worth of material a year, according to a published assessment by Siegfried S. Hecker, a periodic visitor to the plant and a former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Other experts with on-the-ground knowledge said it would probably take much longer for Yongbyon, a Soviet-era facility where maintenance has been neglected, to resume production.
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