North Korea was found to have proposed the transformation of its key nuclear facility in Yongbyon into a peaceful research center.

Joel Wit, a senior research scholar at Columbia University's Weatherhead East Asian Institute, said in a report that North Korean nuclear scientists had made such a proposal last year. Wit made the remark during a seminar organized by Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies on Thursday.

Under the proposal, the North would retain research reactors in the Yongbyon facility even after the facility is denuclearized. The North would also remodel the research reactors to produce medical isotopes.

Wit said that such a proposal could boost efforts to convince Pyongyang to return to the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty on the condition that the communist state dismantles reprocessing facilities in the Yongbyon reactor.