South Koreans to be punished for losing uranium

The South Korean government will punish staff at a state-run atomic research institute for losing uranium samples that were subject to inspection by the UN nuclear watchdog, officials said Friday.
They said two kilograms (4.4 pounds) of uranium, which was reported missing Thursday from the Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI), was believed to have been mistakenly incinerated along with ordinary trash.
"It is inevitable for the government to sternly punish those responsible for the lapse," an official of the Ministry of Science and Technology told journalists on condition of anonymity. Most of the samples were natural uranium but they also included 0.2 grams of 10 percent enriched uranium, from an unauthorised experiment conducted by local scientists in 2000.
The uranium samples were in a special copper container, which was mixed up with ordinary trash and burnt in May. The container has since been retrieved and KAERI is digging through a landfill to search for remnants of the uranium samples, the ministry officials said.
They stressed that the samples had low radioactivity and do not pose any health risks. The UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspected KAERI in 2004 after the institute admitted that its scientists in 1982 and 2000 had extracted or enriched small amounts of plutonium and uranium, two key ingredients for making nuclear weapons.
The IAEA then chided South Korea for making small amounts of weapons-grade nuclear material and put the uranium samples under scrutiny. But it opted not to refer Seoul to the UN Security Council for possible sanctions. Seoul said the tests were conducted without government authorisation and had stopped. South Korea has 20 nuclear power reactors which produce 40 percent of electricity demand.
In the 1970s it also pursued a nuclear weapons programe which was shut down under US pressure. It pledged in 1992 not to acquire plutonium or uranium enrichment facilities as part of a commitment to keep the Korean peninsula free of nuclear weapons. North Korea has promised to shut down its own nuclear programme as part of an international accord following a nuclear weapons test last October.