KEDO discussions took place at the level of a U.S.
Assistant Secretary of State, South Korea's deputy
foreign minister, and the head of the Asian bureau of Japan's Foreign Ministry.
The KEDO Secretariat was located in New York.[2] KEDO was shut down in 2006.
History
KEDO funding by country (1995 to 2005)
Country
U.S. dollars (millions)
South Korea
1,455
Japan
498
United States
405
European Atomic Energy Community
122
Australia
14
Others
18
Formal ground breaking on the site for two light water reactors (LWR) was on August 19, 1997, at
Kumho, 30 km north of
Sinpo.[3][4] The Kumho site had been previously selected for two similar sized reactors that had been promised in the 1980s by the
Soviet Union, before its collapse.[5]
Soon after the Agreed Framework[6] was signed,
U.S. Congress control changed to the
Republican Party, who did not support the agreement.[7][8] Some Republican
Senators were strongly against the agreement, regarding it as
appeasement.[9][10] KEDO's first director,
Stephen Bosworth, later commented "The Agreed Framework was a political orphan within two weeks after its signature".[11]
Arranging
project financing was not easy, and formal invitations to bid were not issued until 1998, by which time the delays were infuriating North Korea.[12] Significant spending on the LWR project did not commence until 2000,[13] with "First Concrete" pouring at the
construction site on August 7, 2002.[14] Construction of both reactors was well behind the original schedule.
In the wake of the breakdown of the Agreed Framework in 2003, KEDO largely lost its function. KEDO ensured that the nuclear power plant project assets at the construction site at
Kumho in North Korea and at manufacturers' facilities around the world ($1.5 billion invested to date) were preserved and maintained. The project was reported to be about 30% complete. One reactor
containment building was about 50% complete and another about 15% finished. No key equipment for the reactors had been moved to the site.
In 2005, there were reports indicating that KEDO had agreed in principle to terminate the light-water reactor project. On January 9, 2006, it was announced that the project was over and the workers would be returning to their home countries. North Korea demanded compensation and has refused to return the approximately $45 million worth of equipment left behind.[15]
^"Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization"(PDF), Inventory of International Nonproliferation Organizations and Regimes, Center for Nonproliferation Studies, 2003,
archived(PDF) from the original on July 27, 2011, retrieved March 5, 2011