The Federal Register published an NRC notice on November 26 concerning information collection for U.S. implementation of its voluntary offer agreement with the IAEA. If you wanna know the sorts of information that the US provides to the agency, here’s a look:

I don’t think I knew about this evolution of nuclear intelligence:

The Scientific Intelligence Branch of ORE was established in January 1947 and shortly thereafter incorporated the Nuclear Energy Group, which had been in charge of atomic energy intelligence in the Manhattan Project, within its ranks. At the end of 1948, the branch was separated from ORE and elevated to office status, becoming the Office of Scientific Intelligence.

From this document.

After I stated that “I can’t speak to whether it’s necessary to reprocess” the “type of spent fuel” produced by the original Yongbyon reactor, someone more knowledgeable than I wrote “It is necessary.”

That was my impression. I would add that the UK in 2014 was looking for a way to dispose of Magnox spent fuel, according to this report from the British Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. If the British were looking into that topic in 2014, it’s probably safe to say that the North Koreans during the 1980s probably had to reprocess the spent fuel .

This Sandia report (which I mentioned here) has a couple of decent graphics. The first is a cutaway view of a Magnox reactor. the second is a diagram of the Purex process. (The report explains that North Korea may have been using a simplified version of this process).

Anyway, here’s the Magnox cutaway:

Here’s the Purex diagram:

I previously wrote about this December 2019 CIA article titled “An Intelligence Perspective: North Korea’s Nuclear Program: The Early Days, 1984–2002.” This part caught my eye:

I can’t speak to whether it’s necessary to reprocess this type of spent fuel. But some of the work done pursuant to the 1994 Agreed Framework may provide a clue. According to the that agreement, the United States and North Korea were to

cooperate in finding a method to store safely the spent fuel from the 5 MW(E) experimental reactor during the construction of the LWR project, and to dispose of the fuel in a safe manner that does not involve reprocessing in the DPRK.

It looks as if the CIA claim may be accurate. This Sandia report describes the nature of spent fuel from Magnox reactors:

The fuel itself is uranium metal, which corrodes much more easily than uranium oxide fuel found in light water reactors. When in contact with water, metallic uranium converts to uranium oxide and uranium hydride. Both uranium metal and uranium hydride are pyrophoric, which presents a fire hazard.

The report further noted that

If the DPRK did not reprocess the spent fuel removed from the storage pool, and just stored it without special care in a dry pit or another water pool, the spent fuel may have undergone severe corrosion. Magnox spent fuel presents a spontaneous fire hazard due to uranium hydride, and may leak fission products through corroded cladding, eventually contaminating the surroundings.

The notional storage time of the canned North Korean spent fuel in the dedicated pool was up to three years, according to the same report. The rest of the plans for the fuel were complicated and involved removing the spent fuel from North Korea. This all suggests to me that, as a practical matter, Pyongyang may have been unable to store the fuel indefinitely.

North Korea did, of course, later conclude a comprehensive safeguards agreement and to get rid of the spent fuel and reprocessing facility.

I mentioned here that much Iraqi intel on Iran’s suspected nuclear weapons program was bad. Here are some examples:

The CIA published an article in 2013 titled Iraqi Human Intelligence Collection on Iran’s Nuclear
Weapons Program, 1980–2003. The piece demonstrates that much Iraqi intel was bad, but it’s worth a look at its accounts of Iran’s interactions with foreign entities.

FWIW, the 2007 NIE assessed “with low confidence that Iran probably has imported at least some weapons-usable fissile material,.” And former DCI John Deutch testified in 1996 that “Iran has launched a parallel effort to purchase fissile material, mainly from sources in the former Soviet Union.:”

• Iranian agents have contacted officials at nuclear facilities in Kazakhstan on several occasions, attempting to acquire nuclear-related materials. For example, in 1992, Iran unsuccessfully approached the Ulba Metallurgical Plant to obtain enriched uranium. 
• In 1993, three Iranians believed to have had connections to Iran’s intelligence service, were arrested in Turkey while seeking to acquire nuclear material from smugglers from the former Soviet Union. 

My former office mate Jeffrey tweeted this video in response to this post:

Following up on this post, this paragraph also caught my eye:

The computer, one might well conclude, was conceived in sin. Its birth helped ratchet up, by several orders of magnitude, the destructive force available to the superpowers during the cold war. And the man most responsible for the creation of that first computer, John von Neumann, was himself among the most ardent of the cold warriors, an advocate of a preemptive military attack on the Soviet Union, and one of the models for the film character Dr. Strangelove. As George Dyson writes in his superb new history, Turing’s Cathedral, “The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time.” Von Neumann had seemingly made a deal with the devil: “The scientists would get the computers, and the military would get the bombs.

In December, the CIA published a an edition of Studies In Intelligence with an article titled “North Korea’s Nuclear Program: The Early Days, 1984–2002.” I disagree with some of the author’s analysis, but the piece is worth a read. For example, I don’t recall seeing this level of detail concerning N Korean HE testing, though I can’t say I’ve looked lately:

Here are the footnotes:

It’s perhaps obvious, but I feel compelled to include this observation:

In Asia, North Korean nuclear questions were not a focus of intelligence or policy concern. Rather, attention was focused on [possible nuclear proliferation by] Taiwan and South Korea.