SEOUL, June 29: UN inspectors on Friday said they were “satisfied” and praised North Korea's cooperation after visiting a nuclear reactor at the centre of efforts to disarm the communist country. Team leader Olli Heinonen said his four-strong International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) team, carrying out the first UN inspection of the Yongbyon reactor in five years, were allowed to view all the areas they wanted to.

“We are satisfied,” Heinonen was quoted as saying by Kyodo News, describing North Korea’s cooperation as “excellent.” UN inspectors were kicked out of North Korea in December 2002 at the start of an international standoff that led to the regime testing a nuclear weapon for the first time last year.

The closure of Yongbyon is the first step in a February deal under which North Korea also agreed to eventually disable the reactor and declare all its nuclear programmes to the nuclear watchdog.

Heinonen’s team was expected to leave on Saturday for Beijing before flying back to IAEA headquarters in Vienna.

Meanwhile, South Korean officials said: North Korea and the UN watchdog are expected to announce soon the timetable for shutting down the reactor.

“The IAEA could announce the date (for the Yongbyon shutdown) as early as this week,” an unidentified South Korean foreign ministry official told Yonhap news agency.

Christopher Hill, the US chief envoy at six-party talks on disarming North Korea, said last week he expected the North to shut down the facility by mid-July.

Following a meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington, South Korean foreign minister Song Min-Soon said on Thursday that the next round of the six-party talks could resume once the reactor is closed.

“Once the shutdown is completed, the six-party talks would be able to resume at the earliest possible date,” Song told journalists.

Yongbyon, 95 kilometres north of Pyongyang, was ostensibly built to generate electricity but it is reportedly not connected to any power lines.

Experts believe, it has produced enough plutonium over the past 20 years for possibly up to a dozen nuclear weapons.

Under the February deal, the North must eventually abandon the reactor for good and come clean on all of its nuclear programmes, including an enriched uranium-based scheme which it has denied operating.

If that is judged successful, Pyongyang would eventually receive energy aid equivalent to one million tons of heavy fuel oil.

North and South Korean officials on Friday met at Kaesong, North Korea's southernmost city near the inter-Korean border, to discuss the shipment of 50,000 tons of fuel oil to the North.

—AFP