WASHINGTON - NORTH Korea does not appear to be resurrecting its Yongbyon nuclear plant, despite reports Pyongyang had made moves toward relaunching the facility, the US State Department said on Wednesday.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said that North Korea appeared to be moving equipment at the site but that this did not necessarily warrant concern that its nuclear program had been relaunched.

'To my knowledge, based on what we know from the reports on the ground, you don't have an effort to reconstruct, reintegrate this equipment back into the Yongbyon facility,' he said.

His remarks came during a press conference in which he fielded questions about Japanese news reports that North Korea had made good on its threat to begin reassembling the nuclear facility, after the United States failed to remove the communist state from a terrorism blacklist.

North Korea - which tested an atomic weapon in October 2006 before reaching last year's aid-for-disarmament deal - last November began disabling its reactor and other plants at Yongbyon.

The facility, located some 90 kilometres north of Pyongyang, was being disassembled under US supervision as part of a six-nation disarmament-for-aid deal.

Japan's Kyodo News reported, however, that North Korea has begun putting the nuclear facility back together. Kyodo News, quoting unnamed diplomats in Beijing, said North Korea began the work on Tuesday.

Tokyo has objected to taking North Korea off the US terrorism sponsors list until a row has been resolved over the plight of Japanese nationals kidnapped by Pyongyang in the 1970s and 1980s.

For her part, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would not be drawn on the issue of North Korean compliance with the disarmament deal, but stressed on Wednesday that the United States expects Pyongyang to comply with its 'obligations'.

'We are expecting North Korea to live up to its obligations and we will most certainly live up to our obligations,' the top US diplomat said, conceding that the process of getting North Korea to agree to disable the plant has not always been smooth.

'Look, that process has had its ups and downs, as any complex negotiating process will,' she said.

Nevertheless, Dr Rice said, 'we believe that we should keep moving forward'.

'All of the states in the region have a great stake in success of the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula, and we are going to continue to work toward the completion of a verification protocol which can verify the North Korean declaration,' she added.

'We are in contact with our partners about doing that.' -- AFP