VIENNA, Dec 19: The UN atomic agency has launched an investigation into whether South Korea plans to produce weapons-grade plutonium at a facility it is building, a diplomat said on Monday.

The pilot facility South Korea is building uses ‘pyrometallurgical processing’ to make spent fuel into a compact and less radioactive form so that it can be stored, said the diplomat, who asked not to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue.

The advanced spent fuel conditioning process demonstration facility (ACPF) at the Korea Atomic Energy Research institute in Daejeon has been under construction since 2004 and is not expected to come online until 2007, the diplomat said.

“What’s critical in all this is to make sure that when reducing spent fuel that the South Koreans don’t separate out plutonium,” said the diplomat, who is close to the watchdog International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).

The report was confirmed by another diplomat close to the IAEA.

“The process is pyrometallurgical processing. It is a different kind of processing” than the plutonium separation for which the IAEA investigated South Korea last year, the first diplomat said.

“Revelations about South Korea’s nuclear activities remind everyone of the high stakes” on the Korean peninsula, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said in an article last February.—AFP