Satellite imagery suggests recent flooding in North Korea may have damaged pump houses connected to the country’s main nuclear facility, a U.S.-based think-tank said on Thursday.
Analysts at 38 North, a website that monitors North Korea, said commercial satellite imagery from August 6-11 showed how vulnerable the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center’s nuclear reactor cooling systems are to extreme weather events.
The Korean peninsula has been hammered by one of the longest rainy spells in recent history, with floods and landslides causing damage and deaths in both North and South Korea.
Located on the bank of the Kuryong River about 100 km (60 miles) north of North Korea’s capital, Pyongyang, Yongbyon is home to nuclear reactors, fuel re-processing plants and uranium enrichment facilities that are thought to be used in the country’s nuclear weapons programme.
The five-megawatt reactor - believed to be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium - does not appear to have been operating for some time, and an Experimental Light Water Reactor (ELWR) has not yet come online, but such flooding in the future would likely force a shutdown, the 38 North report said.
“Damage to the pumps and piping within the pump houses presents the biggest vulnerability to the reactors,” the report said. “If the reactors were operating, for instance, the inability to cool them would require them to be shut down.”
According to the Soviet participants of the Post-Accident Review Meeting in Vienna severe violations made by the personnel of the Unit 4 of the Chernobyl NPP on 25-26 April 1986 were the main reasons of the Chernobyl accident. As especially serious violations were named the following:
-operation of the reactor at a very low operative reactivity surplus (ORS),
-conducting of the experiment by the power below the level provided for test,
-blocking of the protection system relaying on water level and steam pressure in steam
-separators,
-blocking of the protection system relaying on shutdown signal from two turbogenerators,
-connection of all the main circulating pumps to the reactor,
-switching off the emergency core cooling system (ECCS).
Also:
@Thaeyongho confirms what's been clear the past 30 years: #DPRK uses carrot-and-stick strategy to tame its adversaries & engages in talks to buy time & money with which to build more bombs & missiles. And #KimJongUn's fake outreach in 2018 was already planned in 2016. https://t.co/jk3FZwb5T8
— Sung-Yoon Lee (@SungYoonLee1) August 13, 2020
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