FACTBOX: North Korea's Yongbyon nuclear facilities

July 19 - Here are five facts about North Korean nuclear facilities at Yongbyon which the International Atomic Energy Agency said had been shut down, as the North agreed to do in a February disarmament deal.

LOCATION:

* Located about 100 km (60 miles) north of the capital Pyongyang, Yongbyon is the centre of North Korea's nuclear program. It has an estimated staff of 2,000.

CAPABILITIES:

* The complex consists of an operational five-megawatt atomic reactor, a plant that can extract plutonium from nuclear fuel used in the reactor, a nuclear fuel fabrication facility and research labs.

Used uranium fuel used can be refined to extract plutonium, the fissile material that North Korea used in its first nuclear test on Oct 9, 2006.

-- The site also contains a 50-megawatt reactor whose construction was suspended under a 1994 nuclear deal with the United States. The reactor is not near completion.

INSPECTIONS:

* International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) inspectors first visited the centre in July 1992, but were expelled in December 2002. Monitoring has subsequently been conducted largely by satellite.

SHUT DOWN?:

* Shutting Yongbyon is the first step of a six-party deal among the two Koreas, the United States, Japan, Russia and China. The United States and North Korea had reached an agreement, now defunct, in 1994 to freeze the facility in exchange for two relatively proliferation-resistant light-water reactors.

Negotiators from the six sides are meeting in Beijing to begin mapping out the next phase of the disarmament deal, which would entail permanently "disabling" the Yongbyon complex and gaining a full declaration of all North Korea's nuclear activities.

HISTORY:

* Yongbyon's nuclear capabilities were kick-started with Soviet help in the 1960s, when a Soviet research reactor was built. Modernized by North Korean experts in 1974, the site has housed a physics college to train atomic reactor specialists since the 1980s.