The five-megawatt reactor was North Korea's only source of plutonium for its weapons program.
One of its reactors produced plutonium for the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, in 1945.
Nuclear weapons, too, can be produced using either uranium enriched to weapons-grade or plutonium.
One large reprocessing plant can produce about 1, 000 bombs' worth of plutonium each year.
While it talks about international control of plutonium neither are accurate descriptions of its terms.
This, said the Americans, suggested North Korea may have built a second plutonium plant.
On Tuesday, it announced it would restart a plutonium reactor it had shut down in 2007.
Hecker has estimated that North Korea has enough plutonium to make several crude nuclear bombs.
The five megawatt reactor was North Korea's only source of plutonium for its weapons program.
The same is true of reprocessing: you can get plutonium out of used fuel.
On Tuesday, in fact, plutonium was detected in the soil around the Fukushima power plant.
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Clinton said the Obama administration is placing a priority on ending Pyongyang's production of plutonium.
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It provided a means of converting uranium to plutonium for the generation of electricity.
North Korea's first two tests involved plutonium, but it is believed to have a uranium-enrichment programme.
North Korea had agreed to disable the reactor that had produced plutonium for nuclear weapons.
Back in 1994, in agreeing to a plutonium freeze, North Korea balked at proper inspections.
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Sites containing around half of Russia's weapons-usable uranium and plutonium still await security upgrades.
Small amounts of uranium or plutonium, obtained illicitly from abroad, would be hard to detect.
The destroyed installation was a virtual clone of North Korea's Yongbyon plutonium production facility.
Iran is also building a heavy-water reactor that could produce plutonium, another bomb ingredient.
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Yet their rivalry is fuelling the fastest, most dangerous build-up of bomb-usable plutonium and uranium anywhere.
The Hanford facility processed plutonium for nuclear weapons during World War II and the Cold War.
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It has deliberately made it hard for inspectors to discover the true extent of its plutonium-dabbling.
Normal fission involves breaking uranium or plutonium atoms up by hitting them with neutrons.
North Korea, by contrast, boasts of its ability to produce pots of plutonium for bombs.
Cesium remains the most widely dispersed isotope while concerns remain over long-term contamination from strontium and plutonium.
In this sense only, more nuclear tests would actually help, by using up what plutonium is left.
Reprocessing the recovery of plutonium from spent reactor fuel to make new fuel was conceived when plutonium was valuable.
It will take approximately 15 years for the MOX facility to process the 34 MT of plutonium.
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That, say some, would be even more perilous than adding more plutonium to Russia's existing gigantic stockpile.
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