Pakistan building 3rd nuclear reactor: report

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Pakistan is building a third plutonium nuclear reactor to boost production of atomic bombs, a US-based research group said on Friday.
Satellite images show work progressing rapidly at Khusab, 100 kilometres from Islamabad, where the two other reactors are already sited, the Institute for Science and International Security said in a report.
Pakistan carried out its only nuclear tests in May 1998 after similar detonations by rival India, alarming the world.
The construction work would ‘imply that Pakistan’s government has made a decision to increase significantly its production of plutonium for nuclear weapons,’ the institute said in the report.
‘Almost all of the third reactor construction visible in the June 3, 2007 image has taken place in the last 10 months,’ it added.
Pakistani officials were not immediately available for comment.
The first reactor at Khusab began operations in 1998 while the institute reported that a second was being built in July 2006. The third reactor is several hundred metres away from the second.
The institute reported earlier this year that Pakistan had resumed construction on its second plutonium separation facility at Chashma, around 80 kilometres away from Khusab.
It said this was ‘likely related’ to the building of the two new reactors.
The report said that neither the reactors nor the separation plant were safeguarded by the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Pakistan, the world’s only known nuclear-armed Muslim country, remains at the heart of an investigation into an atomic black market headed by its disgraced chief nuclear scientist, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
Khan confessed in 2004 to passing atomic secrets to Iran, Libya and North Korea. He was pardoned by president Pervez Musharraf but remains under virtual house arrest in Islamabad.

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