South Korea offers to supply North electricity

SEOUL - South Korea has offered to directly supply electricity to North Korea if the communist state agreed to dismantle its nuclear weapons programmes, a sweetener for its neighbour ahead of six-country talks later this month.

Seoul recently said it had offered a substantial incentive package that went beyond any others made before to the North, which agreed at the weekend to return to stalled nuclear negotiations in the week of July 25.

At the last round of talks, in June 2004, the United States proposed giving fuel aid and security guarantees if the North abandoned its nuclear ambitions.

South Korean Unification Minister Chung Dong-young told a news conference that Seoul had proposed supplying 2 million kilowatts of power directly to the North.

He said the offer would replace a frozen project under which an international consortium was building proliferation-resistant, light-water atomic reactors in the North to supply power.

"This proposal is to provide the North with energy to replace the nuclear power," he said. "(If agreed), the North's nuclear arms will be dismantled and the power will be supplied within three years."

The amount of power is equivalent to the capacity of two large nuclear power plants and could supply a third of the demand of South Korea's capital, Seoul, home to some 10 million people.

Chung said he explained the details of the plan when he met the North's leader Kim Jong-il in Pyongyang on June 17.

After that meeting Kim told Chung the North could return to the talks as early as July if the United States met certain conditions, such as treating it with "respect".

"Of the two main items sought by North Korea, this plan will help them solve their energy-economic issue. The other item, about security guarantees and the relationship with the United States, will have to be discussed and explored with the other countries in the six-party talks," Chung said.

The Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organisation, or KEDO, was founded by the United States, South Korea and Japan to implement a 1994 nuclear agreement.

Under the deal, Pyongyang agreed to freeze a programme of producing plutonium for nuclear weapons and Washington agreed to provide the North with replacement energy sources - two light water nuclear power reactors and supplies of heavy fuel oil totalling US$4.5 billion.

However, key officials in US President George W Bush's administration never liked the deal because they felt it rewarded Pyongyang for bad behaviour and believed the North could not be trusted.

The deal collapsed after the Washington accused Pyongyang in October 2002 of pursuing a separate covert uranium enrichment programme and the North expelled international monitors from its reactor site at Yongbyon.

"The cost to supply power is expected to be covered by the cost set for the light-water reactor project," Chung said.

Seoul had invested over an estimated US$1.5 billion in the light-water project.

- REUTERS