IAEA chief arrives in ROK for 4-day visit

Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Mohamed ElBaradei arrived in Seoul on October 3 for a four-day visit.

The main purpose of the visit by ElBaradei is to attend an international conference, the 54th Pugwash Conference on Science and World Affairs, scheduled for Oct. 5-8.

Pugwash meeting was named after the location of the first meeting, which was held in 1957 in the village of Pugwash, Nova Scotia, Canada. Most sessions of the meeting are behind the door.

Influential scholars and public figures from various countries attend the annually meeting in private to discuss ways how to reduce the danger of armed conflict and seeking cooperative solutions for global problems.

ElBaradei's South Korea trip comes as Seoul awaits a verdict from the IAEA on its controversial experiments involving nuclear materials. The two one-off experiments, one in 1982 and the other in 2000, led to the production of small amounts of plutonium and enriched uranium, the two main types of fissile material used in nuclear weapons.

Upon arrival, ElBaradei is to meet South Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon and attend a dinner hosted by Ban at Shilla Hotel in downtown Seoul.

On next Monday, he is scheduled to pay a call on South Korean Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan. Meetings with Unification Minister Chung Dong-young and Science Minister Oh Myung are scheduled for Tuesday, according to local media reports.

"In meetings with Director General ElBaradei, the government plans to express our intention to provide active cooperation to the IAEA and ask the IAEA to conduct a fair investigation," South

Korean Foreign Ministry said in a statement earlier.

South Korea has repeatedly claimed it has no intention to develop nuclear weapons, but suspicious still have with the two experiments.

The UN nuclear watchdog is scheduled to make a final decision in November on whether to refer the issue to the UN Security Council.

Two IAEA teams visited South Korea for inspections last month.

A third team is expected to visit this month.

IAEA chief heads for South Korea

Mohamed ElBaradei, director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), left Vienna for a visit to South Korea on Saturday to discuss Seoul's secret nuclear research.

El Baradei's trip to South Korea had been scheduled before the country's nuclear activities were disclosed, IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said.

"There are a number of topics he wishes to discuss and of course he understands that the recent revelation about nuclear experiments will come up in the discussions," she said.

On Sept. 9, the South Korean government admitted that several scientists secretly extracted a minimal amount of plutonium during a research experiment in 1982.

The acknowledgment came one week after Seoul's announcement that a few South Korean researchers conducted enriched uranium separation experiment four years ago.

After the revelation, El Baradei said the country's secret research was "a matter of serious concern" and he will continue to probe into the case.

IAEA inspectors, who were in South Korea last week to take environmental samples and interview scientists, will submit a report to the IAEA board of governors next month.

South Korea says the laboratory experiments were not linked to nuclear weapons programs, but diplomats here indicated that the country's failure to report the experiments was a violation of the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and should be reported to the UN Security Council.

Source: Xinhua