By Yoon Won-sup
Staff Reporter
The U.N. nuclear watchdog said it will decide the procedures for the shutdown of North Korea's nuclear reactors early next month and send its inspectors within days of the decision.
Melissa Fleming, spokesperson of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), said in an interview with the Voice of America (VOA) Wednesday that a special board meeting will be held on July 9 to approve procedures for monitoring and verifying the shutdown. The procedures will be based on a report from IAEA officials currently in North Korea.
She said the IAEA will be able to dispatch a delegation of inspectors to North Korea several days after the meeting. They will work on the concrete steps of the shutdown with North Korean government officials, she added.
Regarding the IAEA officials who are visiting nuclear facilities in Yonbyon, North Korea, on Thursday and Friday, Fleming said their visit will greatly contribute to the shutdown.
The team led by Olli Heinonen, deputy director general of the IAEA, will leave Pyongyang on Saturday for the IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria, to report their meeting with North Korean nuclear officials on the monitoring procedures of the shutdown.
Heinonen, who arrived in Pyongyang on Tuesday with his three colleagues, has been negotiating arrangements for verification of the shutdown and sealing of the North's main reactor.
The VOA, a U.S. government-funded radio station, said that the IAEA inspectors will likely visit North Korea in the second week of July if the communist country shuts down the nuclear facilities as promised.
North Korea agreed in the six-party talks to implement the nuclear shutdown in February. But the Stalinist state didn't keep its promise, as the deadline was April 14, arguing that the United States had frozen its money in a Macau bank.
The banking issue was resolved and the money was finally transferred to North Korea late last week via a Russian central bank and the U.S. Federal Reserve in New York.
Christopher Hill, chief U.S. negotiator to the six-party talks, told reporters early this week in Washington that the multilateral talks will resume in the second week of next month if the IAEA team has a successful visit to North Korea and the Yongbyon nuclear reactors are shut down according to an IAEA timetable.
Nuclear facilities in Yongbyon are a five-megawatt graphite-moderated reactor, a plutonium-producing radiochemical laboratory and a nuclear fuel rod fabrication plant.