In a recent report, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) assessed that North Korea’s 5-megawatt-electric gas-graphite reactor at Yongbyon has resumed operations. 

The IAEA director-general placed the rough time of the reactor’s restart at July 2021, marking the end of a two-and-half-year break in operations. The IAEA last assessed that the reactor ceased operations in Dec. 2018, shortly after the first U.S.-North Korea summit meeting in Singapore and two inter-Korean summits that year.

The restart of Yongbyon is broadly unsurprising given the ongoing quantitative expansion of North Korea’s nuclear