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Wollo-ri - 39.03°N 125.37°E

Pyongyang is home to healthy spring waters. The typical one is at the foot of Mt Ryongak in Wollo-ri, Mangyongdae District. The mountain is called “Mt Kumgang in Pyongyang” for the mysterious harmony of singular towering peaks, full-blooming flowers, dense forests and glorious tints of autumn foliage.

The spring water there has been renowned since olden times. The place name “Wollo-ri” derives from the meaning that lots of people enjoy longevity as they drink the water. It wells up from the depth of over 70 metres under the foot of the mountain. It ideally contains a variety of mineral substances and major ions good for health including calcium, magnesium, strontium, metasilicic acid, chlorine ion and sulfuric acid ion. In particular, it appropriately contains selenium and fluorine. It is slightly alkaline with its pH being 7.47. Fluorine protects teeth and selenium, metasilicic acid and strontium are effective in preventing heart disorders, cancer, cerebrovasular diseases, chronic colitis and arthritis.

Bottled water is produced at the modern Ryongaksan Spring Water Factory. The products are supplied to service networks in Pyongyang. The water was certified by SGS-CSTC Standards Technical Services Co., Ltd on three occasions including in June 2015.

Wollo-ri is near the uranium enrichment plant of Kangson , in the neighboring city of Nampo (North Korean west coast). The Wollo-ri facility was identified in 2015 by researchers at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, which specializes in open-source intelligence previously chose not to publicize the facility because they could not identify its role within North Korea's nuclear program. However, the publication of the site's name and function in the book Kim Jong Un and the Bomb written by Ankit Panda, who works for the Federation of American Scientists, made its location a matter of public interes.

Imagery captured by Planet Labs was analyzed by experts at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. "It has all the signatures of a North Korean nuclear facility -- security perimeter, on-site housing, monuments to unpublicized leadership visits, and an underground facility. And it sits right next to a bottled water factory that has none of those characteristics," Lewis told CNN.

In the evaluation made by experts from the Middlebury Institute for International Studies, suggested that they found a facility producing nuclear warheads in the town of Wollo-ri near Pyongyang. Professor Jeffrey Lewis stated that the new facilities built secretly by the Pyongyang administration have all the distinctive features of North Korea's nuclear facilities, such as the level of security and underground bunkers.

The South Korean Ministry of Defense, on the other hand, refrained from verifying the existence of the facilities in question. South Korea’s military and intelligence authorities have dismissed a CNN report that said activity suspected of being nuclear warhead production has been spotted at a previously unknown facility in Wollo-ri, Pyongyang.

An intelligence source said that there are no facilities in that area that develop or produce nuclear weapons, adding that the one reported on by CNN is not crucial with regard to the North’s nuclear weapons development. Another source said there is a facility in Wollo-ri that is suspected of supporting the weapons program but nothing has been confirmed, adding that Seoul and Washington are closely watching the facility. A military official, meanwhile, said the satellite imagery released in the U.S. media report showed a spring water factory, adding it doesn’t make sense for there to be a nuclear warhead facility near a spring water factory [but many things in the DPRK don't make much sense].

And military source in North Korea refuted the CNN report claiming that there is activity at a “nuclear facility” in Pyongyang, saying that the supposed nuclear weapons facility is actually a school for training military officers. “The building in question is the ‘Pyongyang Anti-aircraft Unit Command’s Political Military University,’ which is located on the right-hand side of a road running through Wonro Village heading toward Taedong County from Chilgol Station [a subway station],” the source told Daily NK today. “[The facility] has nothing to do with nuclear weapons.” Daily NK’s source said that the “on-site housing” mentioned in the CNN report is to the right-hand side of the front gate of the school and that they are “not high” – just “one-story houses with two families to a building” – and that school staff are living there.

The "actual" function of this site, absent thorough on-site inspection, remains unproven. The Panda/Lewis analysis ignores the extensive housing complex to the West of the site, assigning the housing function to half a dozen medium rise buildings of about seven stories height. This analysis is plausible under the assumption that the functional work areas of the site are undergroun. At least three "possible" UGF [underground facility] entrances are located by Lewis. The eastern-most of the three resembles a parking garage backed up to an excavated hill-side, which is a plausible configuration for a "possible UGF" entrance, but lacks the robust "road to nowhere" that is characteristic of a "probably UGF" adit. The other two "possible UGF entrances" are entirely innocent of any functionally related observable differences [FROD, pronounced "fraud", an old arms control joke]. But an equally, if not more, plausible conjecture suggestes there are not UGF entrances, places the functional work areas in the high rise buildings, and the housing in the rather extensive low rise housing areas to the West of the main site.

Lewis and the other fine folks at the Martin Center were probably right to begin with in concluding there was insufficient information to permit conclusions as to the function of this site.