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Undeclared uranium hitches a ride on cobalt exports from Congo, study says
Philippe (left) and Manzuk quantified the amount of uranium that has been exported from the DRC in cobalt shipments or left behind in the environment. (Photo: Joel Hallberg/UW–Madison)
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and Princeton University have published a study in Nature Communications that calls attention to a blind spot in nuclear nonproliferation: The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has exported thousands of metric tons of uranium, and there is no accounting for where it has gone.
In partnership with Lighthouse Reports and the Financial Times, UW–Madison nuclear engineering professor and nuclear security expert Sébastien Philippe and Ryan Manzuk, a geologist and research fellow in Philippe’s group and at Princeton, conducted the study using countrywide mineralization and geochemical data.
Sherif S. Nafee
Nuclear Technology | Volume 187 | Number 3 | September 2014 | Pages 328-336
Technical Note | Radiation Transport and Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT13-106
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The calibration of high-purity germanium gamma-ray cylindrical detectors using bar (parallelepiped) sources is carried out analytically using the probability correction approach. Improved expressions for the source self-attenuation coefficient have been included in the present algorithm based on the accurate calculation of all possible path lengths covered by the gamma ray inside the bulky source. Moreover, the full-energy peak attenuation coefficient μp is included in the present algorithm. The sources were positioned at long distances from the detector window so that the coincidence summing effects could be neglected. Remarkable agreement between the measured efficiency values and the corrected efficiency values calculated by the present technique was observed. The percentage relative differences for the results calculated in this way from experimental values are at least 25% smaller than those observed and reported by the direct mathematical method in previous work.