Updated on Sunday, July 15, 2007, 00:00 IST

Seoul, July 15: North Korea's Yongbyon reactor was ostensibly built to generate electricity but is reportedly not connected to any power lines.

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

The US State Department said yesterday it had been told that the reactor and other facilities at Yongbyon had been shut down, as part of a six-nation nuclear disarmament deal agreed in February.

UN nuclear inspectors and a first shipment of fuel oil, promised in return for the shutdown, arrived in the communist state earlier in the day.

The reactor, 96 kilometres north of Pyongyang, has a capacity of five megawatts and began operating in 1987. Two larger reactors are at the same site but are not yet thought to be operational, along with a functioning plutonium reprocessing plant several stories high. About 2,000 to 3,000 people work at the complex.

The five-megawatt reactor is too small to make much difference to the nation's acute power shortage and a US Congressional Research Service (CRS) report in January said it reportedly had no power lines attached to it.

Nevertheless, the North demanded steep compensation for lost energy when it shut down Yongbyon under a 1994 "agreed framework" deal with the United States.

An international consortium started work on two proliferation-resistant light water reactors and the US provided an interim 500,000 tonnes a year of heavy fuel oil.

The deal collapsed in 2002, when Washington accused the North of running a covert highly enriched uranium programme, and fuel shipments were suspended.

Bureau Report