Senior U.S. expert to visit Pyongyang next week

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. State Department said on Friday its senior Korea expert will travel to Pyongyang next week for talks with North Korean officials on completing the disablement of their nuclear complex at Yongbyon.

The U.S. diplomat, Sung Kim, will leave Washington on Sunday for Seoul, where he will meet both South Korean and Chinese officials. He travels to Pyongyang on Tuesday, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters.

One topic of discussion would be the possibility of North Korea destroying the cooling tower of its nuclear reactor at Yongbyon, said a U.S. official, speaking on condition that he not be identified.

Under a 2005 multilateral agreement, North Korea promised to abandon all its nuclear programs in exchange for diplomatic and economic benefits.

Under a subsequent accord, it agreed to produce a "complete and correct" declaration of all its nuclear programs and to disable its nuclear facilities as a prelude to their eventually being dismantled.

Out of 11 disablement tasks, the State Department has said three remain unfinished: the discharge of spent fuel from the Yongbyon reactor, the dismantling of its control rod mechanism, and the disabling of the fresh fuel rods.

"He is going to talk to them about those remaining areas and how to finish out the tasks," McCormack said.

The so-called six-party agreement, hammered out among the two Koreas, China, Japan, Russia and the United States, has been bogged down by Pyongyang's failure to produce the nuclear declaration by the end of last year.

It has been held up partly because of the secretive, communist state's reluctance to discuss any transfer of nuclear technology to other countries, notably Syria, as well as to account for its suspected pursuit of uranium enrichment.

The United States accuses North Korea of helping Syria with a suspected nuclear reactor project that Israel destroyed in a September air strike.

Washington also has accused Pyongyang of pursuing a uranium enrichment program, which could provide it with a second way to produce fissile material for nuclear weapons in addition to the plutonium-based program used in its 2006 nuclear test.

Under a face-saving compromise, the declaration is expected to be split into two parts: North Korea's detailed disclosure of its plutonium program on the one hand and its "acknowledgment" of U.S. concerns about its suspected uranium enrichment and proliferation activities on the other.

(editing by Chris Wilson)