Tens of thousands of North Koreans and people in South Korea, Japan and China could be exposed to radioactive materials spread through groundwater from an underground nuclear test site, a Seoul-based human rights group said in a report on Tuesday.
The group, formed in 2014, worked with nuclear and medical experts and defectors and used open source intelligence and publicly available government and U.N. reports for the study, which was backed by the National Endowment for Democracy, a non-profit corporation funded by the U.S. Congress.
Telephone calls by Reuters to North Korea's diplomatic mission to the United Nations in New York went unanswered. China and Japan have ramped up radiation monitoring and expressed concerns over potential exposure following the North's previous nuclear tests but did not openly provide information on contaminated food.
When North Korea invited foreign journalists to witness the destruction of some tunnels at the nuclear test site in 2018, it confiscated their radiation detectors.
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