Fire, smoke and metal at North Korea steel plant

CHOLLIMA, NORTH KOREA: A crane moves a giant bucket brimming with 40 tonnes of molten steel towards a gangway in North Korea’s Chollima Steel Complex.

Flames, smoke and a shower of sparks erupt as a worker thrusts his temperature gauge into the liquid, its tip glowing white-hot as he withdraws it.

Ratcheted high up through a cavernous mill, which contains six separate furnaces, the steel is poured into a press that extrudes it into ingots weighing hundreds of kilogrammes each, still glowing red as they plunge into a pool of water to cool. In front of it hang two banners. “Let us produce steel bars regularly at a high level!” reads one.

“Single-minded unity,” proclaims the other.

The plant, south-west of the capital Pyongyang, has around 8,000 staff and is one of the biggest in North Korea, operating in a sector vital to the economy of the isolated, sanctions-hit country.

Production has averaged 500,000 tonnes annually over the past three years, according to deputy chief engineer Kim Gil-Nam.

The number is slightly lower than the figures from the 1980s on display in a visitor gallery – 517,944 tonnes in 1987, for example. He would not be drawn on its full capacity, and whether output was rising or falling, but two of the six furnaces were undergoing maintenance when AFP visited.

Nuclear-armed North Korea, which carried out its first successful launch of an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) this month, is subject to multiple rounds of United Nations sanctions over its atomic and rocket programmes, and its creaking state sector suffers perennial shortages of equipment and spare parts.

Pyongyang does not issue any official economic statistics, not even GDP growth, regarding such numbers as state secrets, so no national steel production figures are available.

But Kim – who has ‘Safeguard the country’ tattooed on his left forearm, a souvenir of his graduation from middle school–insisted that the plant’ s operations had not been hit by the measures.

“Our great president Kim Il-Sung built a plant in the 1960s that can produce the raw material under any sanctions racket,” he said.

“So although we say we are short of iron on a national level and we are short of this and that, our complex has not really been affected by the sanctions racket by US imperialists.”