AccessDPRK in 2019

This past year has been a banner year for both the project itself and its wider goal of being a fundamental resource for helping to shed light on North Korea.

The #AccessDPRK blog will celebrate its seventh anniversary in February 2020 and currently contains 97 articles which, if printed out, would equal over 570 pages worth of material.

For 2019, I was able to write 28 articles for the project which is the most in its history. Additionally, 70 images were analyzed for those articles. A further 196 images were shared and discussed on Twitter.

Some more social media stats include: over 384,000 Twitter impressions for tweets relating to North Korea and the project (that's a 92% jump over last year), and gained over 100 new followers. I also created a Facebook page that offers a variety of material that won't always be found on Twitter.

Last year's most popular tweet was about ongoing work at the massive underground complex in Hamhung.

AccessDPRK.com traffic was also 32% higher than last year, in part because of the largest news story to come from the project thus far.
In August I wrote about an ongoing industrial leak from the Pyongsan uranium milling plant that was pouring into a river. My report was picked up by RFA before quickly spreading around the world. For a time, it was the biggest news story in South Korea. Concerns over the leak (as the river eventually flows into the Han River) spurred the South Korean government to test for possible radioactive contamination. Thankfully, no dangerous levels were detected. However, 400,000 North Koreans still use the water for drinking and farming, and the risks of heavy metal contamination is far greater for them.

I finally set up a Patreon account so that people can directly support the project. With multiple support levels ($3, $5, $15, and $20 a month), it offers ways for people of any economic means to help. I have worked to come up with exclusive rewards and I'm currently in the process of creating even more.

Working on AccessDPRK isn't free. It costs money to have websites and domain registration, and books and other research materials come at a price. Then there's the matter of fairness. I have literally put thousands of hours into creating the maps, analyzing images, and writing articles, all because I believe in the mission of sharing information about North Korea. But I can't keep doing it alone or at the cost of working on other things in my life.
So if you see value in the last seven years of the project and look forward to more in the future, please do think about helping out. The more support I get, the more I can do. 2019 was certainly proof of that.

Speaking of doing more. Last year I added well over a thousand new places to what will become the final Google Earth-based map: Phase III. I also set a goal of completing it by 2021 and expect it to contain around 60,000 places of interest. There's nearly 100 individual categories of places that I am mapping divided into three broad sections: monuments, military, and domestic/economic. The end result will also be organized somewhat differently than 2017's Phase II, to improve its ease of use.

Finding examples of people using the project to help in their own research is always great. For the second year in a row RAND Corporation used parts of Phase II to assist in creating their report "Four Problems on the Korean Peninsula". Additionally, I was able to help a number of university students and researchers with their respective projects.

AccessDPRK also received a little unexpected publicity in December with the publication of "The Self-Appointed Spies Who Use Google Earth to Sniff Out Nukes" by Amy Zegart for The Atlantic. In the piece, Zegart looked at the open-source community and its efforts to serve as watchdogs against nuclear proliferation. She used several examples of non-government individuals and groups who monitor North Korea, Iran, and China, and AccessDPRK was among them.

I have also been able to occasionally contribute articles to NKNews.org (Pro). These articles draw upon what has been learned from the most recent North Korea research including things exposed by this project. I'm really proud of this.

North Korea's recent WPK Central Committee's Fifth Plenary Meeting strongly indicates that 2020 is going to be a rather interesting and provocative year, and I am looking forward to taking on the challenge with your support.


I would like to thank my current Patreon supporters: Kbechs87, GreatPoppo, and Planefag.

--Jacob Bogle, 1/1/2020
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Nuclear Fallout Part II: the health consequences of Pyongyang's nuclear program

Pollution and health risks exists at every point along the nuclear weapons’ development chain, from the initial mining and milling operations to the enrichment process, and finally from testing nuclear devices. In this two-part article I will examine each of those areas and the health risks associated with them.

In this second part, I finish discussing the health consequences of North Korea’s nuclear program by examining issues related to their underground testing. (Part I can be read here.)

Testing

After producing the needed nuclear fuel and solving the other matters associated with creating a nuclear device, the next step is testing.

After decades of work the regime was able to test its first nuclear device in 2006. The underground test was carried out within Mount Mantap at the Punggye-ri nuclear test site. However, there is no such thing as a safe nuclear test, even when they’re underground. The original tunnel for the 2006 test was closed up shortly after the test as a result of radiation releases according to 38 North. Since 2006, five additional tests have been carried out in different tunnels. Further reporting indicates that another delayed leak was also detected as a result of post-tunneling activities in 2013.

Even under the best circumstances, underground nuclear testing still can release some radionuclides into the atmosphere. Less than optimal testing can pose a much greater radiation risk to those downwind of the test site. Initial radiation releases from a containment failure occur through “venting” but releases can continue for longer through “seeps”, where radiation finds its way out of the underground site through small fissures and openings in the overlying rock. Radioisotopes of xenon (such as ¹³³Xe and ¹³⁵Xe) are almost impossible to contain and can travel across the globe, as Canadian detectors picked them up after the very low-yield 2006 test.

Punggye-ri is in a mountainous area with little population but the main tunnel entrances are less than 2 miles away from the boundary of the Hwasong Concentration Camp. Due to the extreme human rights violations facing prisoners, we can’t hear their stories or send professionals over to determine how much radiation they have been exposed to. Residents within the larger area, however, have been able get their experiences to the broader world.

In 2017, South Korea reported that four defectors who lived in the area around Punggye-ri showed signs of radiation exposure. Defector Lee Jeong Hwa, who lived in Kilju County, said, "So many people died we began calling it 'ghost disease’…We thought we were dying because we were poor and we ate badly. Now we know it was the radiation." Unfortunately, the inability to do detailed testing on people still living in the area and gather more definitive evidence prevents us from knowing the full effects of the testing.

Negative health impacts from underground nuclear testing is easily supported by looking at the results of underground testing in the United States. According to the US National Cancer Institute, some 2,800 annual cases of thyroid cancer within the US can be attributed to the “underground era” of 1962-1992, when the United States (and the Soviet Union) was limited to testing nuclear devices underground by treaty. While North Korea has only had a limited number of tests, those tests have increased radiation levels for the region and caused an unknown level of damage to the population. Of particular concern are the 20,000 Hwasong prisoners, who are also suspected of being used as slave labor to help dig the tunnels used at Punggye-ri.

The stability of portions of Mount Mantap is also of concern after six tests, and surface changes as a result of ground shifting have been studied in detail. The first two (of four) tunnels are likely to be unusable for any future testing. Worries over accidental radiation releases from collapsing tunnels spurred China to install additional radiation detectors along their border with North Korea in 2017 and at a newly constructed border crossing in 2019.

The other two tunnels exist to the west and south and have not been used to-date. Their entrances were demolished in May 2018; however, questions remain about the irreversibility of those closures.

Occasional rumors of a possible future above-ground test (for which there are very few potential testing sites) raises the stakes even more. Radiation would flood over Japan and would reverse decades of atmospheric radionuclide decline around the globe.

Conclusion

The known risks associated with the chemicals and processes involved in mining, milling, and enriching uranium, as well as in the production of other radioactive materials, supports the descriptions of illnesses as told by unrelated sources, each with first-hand knowledge of the locations discussed.

Despite the guarantees of the North Korean constitution and international law regarding the right to favorable working conditions and the right to pick one’s career (or to leave it), expert and defector testimonies, coupled with satellite imagery, paints a very different and dangerous story. It can be said that a major humanitarian and health crisis is brewing within North Korea as we know the substandard state of their nuclear program – not just in terms of technology but also safety.

Most of the facilities within Punggye-ri’s 17-kilometer-long compound still stand, waiting to be used again. Yongbyon continues to grow and thousands of additional scientists, laborers, and their families have been moved in under Kim Jong Un. The mines and milling plants still produce materials to be sent to enrichment facilities. And the regime keeps working on their abilities to deliver ballistic missiles to any part of the globe. It is clear that the sixty years of nuclear harm now affecting the tens of thousands of North Koreans who have worked to develop Pyongyang’s nuclear program over three generations of Kim will continue into the future, causing more harm, more sickness, and will likely require the efforts of multiple countries to finally resolve once the Kim Era is over.

I would like to thank my current Patreon supporters: Kbechs87, GreatPoppo, and Planefag.

Jacob Bogle, 12/26/2019

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