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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.
L. K. Mansur, Y. M. Charara, S. B. Guetersloh, I. Remec, L. W. Townsend
Nuclear Technology | Volume 166 | Number 3 | June 2009 | Pages 263-272
Technical Paper | 2007 Space Nuclear Conference / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT09-A8840
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Calculations have been carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of a range of carbon- and hydrogen-rich materials for shielding against energetic heavy ions relevant to the galactic cosmic ray spectrum. Experimental work integrated with the calculations included both preparation and characterization of physical properties of candidate materials and measurements of fragmentation (breakup) of ion beams of 16O and 40Ar in the tens of GeV energy range in these materials. We have simulated the fragmentation experiments using both the HETC-HEDS and PHITS high-energy particle transport codes. The purposes of these computational simulations were to investigate the effectiveness as spacecraft personnel shielding of various novel as well as commercially available materials for future lunar and interplanetary missions and to validate the codes against experimental data. In the present contribution we report results of the fragmentation simulations and compare them with examples of the experimental measurements.