The South Korean government is recreating the interior of North Korea's uranium enrichment facility at Yongbyon in a three-dimensional virtual space. With on-site inspections still suspended 17 years after the International Atomic Energy Agency withdrew from North Korea in 2009, the project aims to map the internal layout and equipment placement of the country's nuclear facilities in preparation for the resumption of inspections.
The Korea Institute of Nuclear Nonproliferation and Control (KINAC), an agency under the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission, is working on a project to reconstruct four interior zones of the Yongbyon enrichment facility, covering a combined 6,179 square meters, in 3D, nuclear industry sources said on the 14th. KINAC is a specialized agency under the commission that conducts safeguards work to monitor and verify that nuclear material at domestic nuclear facilities is not diverted for military use, and develops technology related to nuclear nonproliferation and nuclear security. Securing verification technology and expert personnel in preparation for the denuclearization of North Korea is also one of its main tasks.
The institute is said to already hold content depicting the exterior of major buildings at the Yongbyon complex — including the reactor, the reprocessing facility and the enrichment facility — along with the surrounding terrain and roads. This time, it will extend the scope of visualization from the outside of the buildings to the inside, recreating a control room and adjoining spaces totaling 1,312 square meters, as well as three cascade zones where centrifuges are linked to enrich uranium. The model will also offer an overhead view of the facility, allowing users to take in the spatial relationship between major equipment and areas at a glance. The approach is to link the model to the existing exterior rendering of the Yongbyon complex, integrating the outside and inside of the buildings into a single virtual space. Basic data for the 3D work will draw on previously released photographs of the facility interiors, with the structure and equipment layout reconstructed through estimation.
"We plan to recreate the interior based on material such as publicly available photographs, and to reconstruct the parts for which no material exists through estimation to the extent possible," an official at the Nuclear Safety and Security Commission said, adding that the content is "for the training of researchers who carry out related work." The project draws attention because it is being pursued at a time when international access to North Korea's nuclear sites has been blocked for years.
Yongbyon is the core hub of North Korea's nuclear program, a complex housing a reactor used to produce plutonium, a spent fuel reprocessing facility and uranium enrichment facilities. The IAEA began inspecting North Korean nuclear facilities in 1992, but the work was halted in April 2009 when Pyongyang demanded the expulsion of inspectors in protest against a United Nations Security Council condemnation of its long-range rocket launch. Inspections have not resumed in the 17 years since. The international community tracks nuclear activity using satellite imagery and open-source information, but there are limits to confirming how facilities are actually operating and how much nuclear material is being produced.
North Korea has meanwhile moved to expand its nuclear facilities. In a report on North Korean nuclear safeguards released in September, the IAEA assessed that a newly built two-story structure at the Yongbyon complex is a second uranium enrichment facility. The agency estimated that as many as 28 centrifuge cascades could be installed there. Because on-site access is impossible, however, it was unable to confirm the actual scale of the equipment or its operating status. The IAEA is also said to be using 3D modeling technology to accumulate information on North Korean nuclear facilities under those same constraints.
The 3D material to be developed in South Korea is expected to be used when new information on North Korean nuclear facilities becomes available. For now, it is most likely to serve researchers analyzing the operating status of those facilities or studying the structure of nuclear material production plants and methods of verifying them. The aim is to secure training material so that domestic nonproliferation researchers can familiarize themselves in advance with the internal structure and equipment layout at Yongbyon. Given that the project is being pursued while international on-site access remains blocked, the range of uses could widen further. The plan is to accumulate expertise through the 3D build in preparation for the possibility that nuclear verification activity resumes. "If denuclearization and international nuclear verification work resume, we need to be ready for the role our government will have to play," a nuclear industry official said. "Domestic specialized institutions will need to take part in a range of areas, from collecting and analyzing radioactive material to determine whether North Korea has conducted a nuclear test, to verifying the safety of nuclear facilities."