AP: Miners Drawn to Illegal Congo Uranium

Business is booming in the mining zone that supplied uranium for the atomic bombs unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki - despite a decree by Congo's president banning all mining activity here.

President Joseph Kabila ordered the zone closed three months ago amid growing concerns that unregulated nuclear materials could get into the hands of so-called rogue nations or terrorist groups. Yet 1,000 miles away from the capital, Kinshasa, thousands of diggers are still hacking away at a dark cavity of open earth in this southeastern village, filling thousands of burlap sacks a day with black soil rich in cobalt, copper - and radioactive uranium.

The illegal mining provides stark evidence of how little control Africa's third-largest nation has over its own nuclear resources, highlighting the government's weak authority beyond the capital in the aftermath of Congo's devastating 1998-2002 war.

"They're digging as fast as they can dig, and everyone is buying it," John Skinner, a mining engineer in the nearby town of Likasi, said of the illegal freelance mining at Shinkolobwe. "The problem is that nobody knows where it's all going. There is no control."

The raw uranium is an inadvertent addition to the miners' real prize - high-grade cobalt in lucrative concentrations - and there is no evidence Congo's uranium is being spirited away to terrorists. The United States, which pressured Kabila to close the mine out of concern over the uranium, said in March it did not believe there was any "worrisome movement" of the radioactive ore at Shinkolobwe.

But some proliferation experts worry because the digging is uncontrolled, and they caution that even small amounts should be tracked for misuse.

Shinkolobwe's deposits were discovered in 1915 when Congo was a Belgian colony. The find helped thrust the world into the nuclear age, providing much of the uranium used in the atomic bombs the United States dropped on Japan in 1945.

Shinkolobwe ceased to be profitable and closed in 1960, Mining Minister Diomi Ndongala said. Belgian authorities, apparently concerned about the mine's safety, filled the main uranium shaft with concrete.

Congo's war and accompanying lawlessness brought prospectors back in 1998. Miners dug new pits just a couple hundred yards from the rusting, weed-choked uranium factory.

Kabila moved against the mine in February to "protect the environment, the population and the world against terrorism," Ndongala said.

His ban has never been enforced, however. Ndongala spoke of plans to drive the miners away from Shinkolobwe with soldiers, but said his cash-strapped government "doesn't have the means" to do so.

Mining is big business in Congo. Government officials declined to give figures on the cobalt industry, but overall exports - including cobalt, diamonds, copper and coffee - topped $1 billion in 2002.

Today at Shinkolobwe, some 5,500 Congolese using shovels, hoes and bare hands haul ores overland to nearby Likasi, where businessmen from Africa, India, China and elsewhere have set up 13 smelting mills.

The end product, and just as often the raw material itself, known as heteroginite, is shipped south by road to neighboring Zambia, and then abroad.

Industry officials say the heteroginite primarily contains high-grade cobalt. But "trace quantities of uranium are being exported unwittingly" along with it, said Skinner, the mining engineer, a Zimbabwean who is a longtime Congo resident.

The diggers, uneducated, hungry and fearful for their jobs, deny any uranium is being mined.

Provincial governor Aime Ngoy Mukena confirmed to The Associated Press that the heteroginite contains uranium, but he and other officials declined to say precisely how much.

Alex Stewart (Assayers) Ltd., a British-based company that provides lab services to the mining industry, found "a high concentration of the highly radioactive uranium-235 in steels from Shinkolobwe," European Parliament member Bart Staes wrote to the European Commission in 2003.

The isotope uranium-235 is needed to support chain reactions in nuclear reactors and weapons. The metal must be refined first, a process called enrichment.

Foreign experts say the uranium being dug up at Shinkolobwe is not significant enough to attract terrorists - a basic bomb needs a half-dozen tons of the raw ore. But no one consistently monitors how much is being mined or exported.

About 20 state mining police officers are posted at Shinkolobwe, but their main task is to ensure diggers pay their taxes. On the Congolese frontier, underpaid officials are easily bribed to let shipments through.

"It's a whole other problem when governments can't control what happens on their own land," said Michael Levi, a science and technology fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Mukena, the governor, told AP that government experts test all minerals for export, but state labs do not have the means to detect uranium.

"There is no local laboratory that can do it," Mukena said, adding that Shinkolobwe was closed partly for that reason.

The U.S. government recently sent experts to inspect Shinkolobwe. U.S. Embassy officials in Kinshasa declined to detail their findings.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. organization that monitors nuclear facilities, also has offered to inspect the mines. The government has not taken up the offer, agency spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said by telephone from IAEA headquarters in Vienna, Austria.

The IAEA begins tracking uranium ore only after it has been enriched into weapons-grade material, a process that requires extremely sophisticated technical know-how, Fleming said.

"There is a huge, long process you have to go through before it gets to a point of concern for the world," Fleming said.

Tom Cochrane, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based advocacy group, agreed.

"The assumption in the past was always that you'd have to divert a huge amount of uranium to make a bomb," Levi said from Washington. "But you can do most of the research leading to a bomb with small amounts of uranium. So you can get very far without being detected."

Saddam Hussein's intelligence archives show a middleman in Nairobi, Kenya, offered to supply Iraq with Congo uranium in 2000, Newsweek reported in its May 17 issue. A note in the intelligence service's file suggested Iraq was then under too much international scrutiny to pursue the deal but recommended Iraq "maintain contact" with the middleman.

The Shinkolobwe mine is not Congo's only nuclear worry. In the capital, an aging, low-power research reactor still operates on an erosion-prone hill at the university.

It has been criticized for lax security, and two of its nuclear fuel rods were stolen in the late 1980s. One was later found in Italy. The other remains missing.

As for Shinkolobwe, "if there was really a political will to close it, it could be closed in a day," Skinner said. "But everybody is making money out of it, and at the end of the day, that's what it's all about."

Mukena, the governor, told AP that government experts test all minerals for export, but state labs do not have the means to detect uranium.

"There is no local laboratory that can do it," Mukena said, adding that Shinkolobwe was closed partly for that reason.

Looks like there is a certain BS Quotient in the article. Decent Geiger counters can be bought on EBay for <$100. Counts/minute/gram can be readily converted to microcuries. The specific activity of mixtures of natural uranium and its daughters is known. The estimation of uranium content, while not a precise AA analysis, could be done by a high scool student in a few minutes.

They obviously do not WANT to test it.

"...a British-based company that provides lab services to the mining industry, found a high concentration of the highly radioactive uranium-235 in steels from Shinkolobwe..."

In fact, if enriched levels of U-235 had been discovered in Congolese steel, that would have been major, earth shaking, stop the press, news.

--Boot Hill

I suppose that there may be some process, perhaps a deep-space meteorite impact, that might yield somewhat higher concentrations than normal/natural, but never sufficient to consider it "enriched." Perhaps some journalists should provide quantitative information when they make these claims and compare this quantification to some absolute standard (the naturally occurring level).

But this line I found most interesting, especially in light of the President's State of the Union address, which was a lie (defined as an utterance of the President):

That's right: Saddam Hussein attempted to procure uranium from Africa. Okay, maybe it wasn't in downtown Niamey, which to liberals, is the entire extent of Africa. I guess the truth of this lie got leaked.

• “Where did he say it was higher than the naturally occuring concentration of 0.7%?”

He said it right here...

“...a British-based company that provides lab services to the mining industry, found a high concentration of the highly radioactive uranium-235 in steels from Shinkolobwe...”

The natural ratio of U238/U235 is 137.88, which corresponds to a U235 concentration of 0.72%. The three sigma variation in that ratio is only 0.375. Virtually all other variations in that ratio are considered to be anthropogenic in origin, i.e., altered by human intervention.

The exceptions to the high uniformity of that ratio are very rare and always in the negative direction. One of these exceptions was found in a uranium mine that had hosted a natural fission reactor millions of years ago, when the concentration of U235 was much higher. It was discovered when the ore revealed a U235 concentration much below the 0.72% standard. I've never heard of a higher concentration that was not anthropogenic uranium.

Even though the reporter failed to say exactly how high "high" was, nevertheless, when a professional assaying company (Alex Stewart, Ltd) reports a "high concentration of U235", they would be speaking of a concentration outside the limits explainable by natural statistical distribution. Otherwise, there would be no point to characterizing it as a "high concentration".

PS: I haven't heard from you in ages. How're you doing?

--Boot Hill

The only way you can have concentrations of U-235 higher than the naturally occurring level of 0.7%, is through an enrichment process. Since there is no enrichment facilities in the Congo, that claim is nothing but pure horse manure.
Somewhat misleading. The naturally-occurring level for concentrations of U-235 that you cite presupposes a sample that consists of 100% uranium. Steel is not uranium; therefore, in general, it should contain no detectable concentrations of uranium of any isotope. In saying that the steel contains a "high concentration" of U-235, the analyzing company simply contends that the iron ore from which the steel was refined contains an unusual impurity, uranium.

Because all enriched uranium is anthropogenic, anyone wishing to build a nuclear bomb must enrich their own uranium. Carefully note from the article that the United States used uranium from this very mine to manufacture the bombs that ended World War II in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That's the danger. And it's still there.

“In saying that the steel contains a "high concentration" of U-235, the analyzing company simply contends that the iron ore from which the steel was refined contains an unusual impurity, uranium.”

If that were true, then the assay company would have simply reported that the steel sample contained "high concentrations" of uranium. But they didn't say that, they specified a "high concentration" of a particular isotope of uranium; U235. The only reason to specify the U235 isotope (as opposed to uranium in general) would be if the U235 isotope occurred in concentrations greater that the natural 0.72%.

--Boot Hill

I'm somewhat familiar with journalists' scientific integrity. It doesn't exist. When a journalist talks science, especially in a non-science article, they're almost invariably talking nonsense. The assayist probably tried to talk to the journalist as if the journalist was reasonably intelligent in the science half of journalist's brain. Or worse, the assayist sent a written report, laden with scientific terminology, to the journalist.

It's pretty well impossible to talk science in terms sufficiently simple for a journalist to grasp the scientific content that a scientist attempts to communicate. I know this from personal experience. Some journalists oversimplify scientific concepts so badly and wrongly that their statements are laughable to the scientifically literate. Others believe that they can overcome their scientific illiteracy by peppering their dispatches with scientific terminology or jargon, almost invariably in such a way that it makes no scientific sense or is utterly untrue. Others make vaguely scientific statements that appear to have no basis in fact but, if true, would make their story more interesting or score better propaganda points. Many journalists combine these errors.

I'll give you an example. I got a call once from a journalist for a major eastern newspaper. Her thesis at the time was that the United States was experiencing the worst drought in its history, that her newspaper's seat was the hardest-hit part of the country, that it was by far the hottest summer anywhere on earth, that certain Republican Governors were to blame, and that Congress could stop the drought by ratifying the Kyoto Accords. I tried to refute her claims using scientific data; in truth, it had been a modestly warm and dry summer in a very small but heavily populated region. I thought I had gotten it simplified enough, but come morning, her dispatch in that newspaper used data and all of her ridiculous claims. She had forced my data to fit her agenda by nifty tricks.

I don't remember the exact facts on that particular day and don't have a copy of her story, so I'll just use example statistics to illustrate the technique. I told her that her city had received 7.2 inches of rain in the past 60 days, compared with a normal of 6.7 inches. She "reported" that I had assured her that her city normally gets 72 inces of rain on the first week of July, but that it had only gotten .67 inches of rain since the beginning of the year. Completely preposterous, but it fit her ridiculous idea, so she printed it. Apparently journalists have real problems communicating numbers and units and don't understand the concept of decimal notation. I've seen these sort of errors more than once, and I don't know how I might have been more clear.

I believe that this is a case of a scientifically illiterate journalist thinking that he'd sound more technically sophisticated if he specified an isotope rather than an element, even though such a statement leads only to more questions than answers.

• “It's pretty well impossible to talk science in terms sufficiently simple for a journalist to grasp the scientific content that a scientist attempts to communicate.”

LOL, well said! I can't tell you how many times I've read news stories that were excellent examples of that. Partly, I think this is an artifact of today's declining educational standards. But it is also due to kids coming out of journalism schools with a built in set of prejudices and biases.

• “Her thesis at the time was...”

Case in point, her mind was made up before she had the facts. She had the cart before the horse.

BTW, I notice from your profile page about your interest in North Korea. Have you checked out any of the threads that TigerLikesRooster posts about North Korea? You might want to consider asking her put you on her ping list.

--Boot Hill

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.