TOKYO: UN inspectors will visit North Korea's Yongbyon reactor, at the heart of the communist state's nuclear weapons drive, on Thursday, the head of the inspection team told Kyodo News on Wednesday.

"Tomorrow, we're going to Yongbyon," the head of the four-person team from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Olli Heinonen, told the Japanese news agency in Pyongyang.

He said they would return to the North Korean capital on Friday.

The five-megawatt reactor, located about 95 kilometres (60 miles) north of Pyongyang, was ostensibly built to generate electricity but is reportedly not connected to any power lines.

Instead, experts say, it has produced enough plutonium for possibly up to a dozen nuclear weapons over its 20-year history.

The last time UN inspectors were in North Korea was in 2002, but they were kicked out in December that year at the start of a crisis that led directly to the regime testing its first ever nuclear weapon last year.

Under a February accord, the North has now promised to shut down and seal the Yongbyon facility under UN supervision in return for badly-needed energy aid and diplomatic concessions.

South Korean Foreign Minister Song Min-Soon voiced his optimism that North Korea would honour its promise, speaking as he left for Washington to discuss ways to speed up disarmament.

"That's a technical issue," he said of the IAEA's discussions in the North on shutting down the facility.

"The IAEA consultation team has entered. After the consultation is over, I think it will be shut down as early as possible," Song told reporters.

"That's not an issue that would take a political decision."

Song said he would meet Thursday with US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice on "how to structure the measures that will follow the initial actions for the denuclearization, how to schedule them and how we should conduct consultations with countries concerned."

Under the terms of the February accord, the North must eventually abandon the Yongbyon reactor. It also agreed to declare all of its nuclear programmes, including an enriched uranium-based scheme which it has denied operating.

As well as diplomatic benefits, such as talks on restoring diplomatic ties with Washington, the regime will also receive emergency energy aid equivalent to one million tons of heavy fuel oil if all goes well.

Meanwhile the head of a European Union delegation that visited North Korea this week said he believed Pyongyang was committed to disarmament.

"We had a real impression that they are willing immediately (to carry out) the shutdown," Hubert Pirker, who led a European Parliament team on a four-day trip to Pyongyang that ended on Tuesday, told journalists here.

US nuclear envoy Christopher Hill, who last week became the highest-ranking US official to visit North Korea since 2002, has predicted it will shut down Yongbyon within three weeks.

He said he hoped the facility could be "disabled" by the end of the year.

Although the accord was agreed in February, its implementation was held up because of a dispute over North Korean funds frozen at a Macau bank.

They were released and finally returned at the weekend to Pyongyang.


- AFP/so