Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/SEOUL: Tens of thousands of North Koreans and citizens in South Korea, Japan, and China could be exposed to radioactive materials spread through groundwater from the underground nuclear test site, a Seoul-based human rights group said on Tuesday.
According to the United States and South Korean governments, North Korea secretly conducted six nuclear arms tests at the Punggye-ri site in the mountainous North Hamgyong Province between 2006 and 2017.
Radioactive materials spreading near different cities
A Transitional Justice Working Group study said that radioactive materials could have spread across eight cities and counties near the site, where more than one million North Koreans live and where the groundwater is used in everyday life, including drinking.
It said that neighbouring South Korea, China, and Japan might be at risk due partly to agricultural and fisheries products smuggled from the North.
The group, formed in 2014, worked with nuclear and medical experts and defectors and used open-source intelligence and publicly available government and United Nations reports for the study, which has been backed by the National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit corporation funded by the United States Congress.
“This report is important in showing that North Korea’s nuclear tests could threaten the right to life and health of not the North Korean people, but of those in South Korea and other neighbouring countries,” said Hubert Young-hwan Lee, the group’s chief and a co-author.
North Korea’s diplomatic mission to the UN in New York went unanswered.
In 2015, South Korea’s food safety agency detected nine times the standard level of radioactive cesium isotopes in imported hedgehog mushrooms had been sold the Chinese produce though their actual origin was North Korea.
Japan and China have ramped up radiation monitoring and expressed concerns over potential exposure following the North’s previous nuclear tests but didn’t openly provide information on contaminated food.
Many outside experts raised concerns over potential health risks from contaminated water. Still, North Korea has rejected such concerns, saying there were no leaks of harmful materials following the previous nuclear tests without providing evidence.
