South Korea, the US, Japan and the EU will hold a meeting next week to decide whether to extend for another year an ongoing freeze of a US-led consortium project to build light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea.

The New York-based Korean Peninsula Energy Development Organization or KEDO is set to hold a board meeting next Thursday to deal with the issue.

South Korea is hoping to restart the project after it was suspended last November on suspicions that North Korea was secretly developing nuclear weapons. The US, however, is widely believed to be in favor of terminating the project.

Early this year, North Korea reacted angrily to the suspension and prevented KEDO from taking its construction equipment and technical documents out of the communist state.

The 4.6 billion-dollar project was part of a 1994 deal between the North and the US, to provide two light-water nuclear reactors in North Korea in return for Pyongyang’s suspension of its nuclear activities.