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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.
M. Hagiwara, H. Iwase, Y. Kirihara, H. Yashima, Y. Iwamoto, D. Satoh, Y. Nakane, H. Nakashima, T. Nakamura, A. Tamii, K. Hatanaka
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 2 | November 2009 | Pages 304-309
Neutron Measurements | Special Issue on the 11th International Conference on Radiation Shielding and the 15th Topical Meeting of the Radiation Protection and Shielding Division (Part 2) / Radiation Protection | doi.org/10.13182/NT168-304
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A shielding benchmark experiment has been performed to obtain the spectra of neutrons penetrating 10- to 100-cm-thick iron shields and 25- to 200-cm-thick concrete shields and to investigate the accuracy of various calculation codes using a 137-MeV quasi-monoenergetic neutron source. The source neutrons are produced from a 1.0-cm-thick lithium target bombarded with 140-MeV protons, and the energy spectra are measured with the time-of-flight (TOF) method using a NE213 organic liquid scintillator. The neutrons emitted in the forward direction were collimated with a 150-cm-thick iron collimator with 10- × 12-cm aperture. TOF and unfolding methods are applied to obtain the energy spectra behind the shield for the peak energy region and continuous-energy region, respectively. Monte Carlo calculations with PHITS and MCNPX are compared with the measured data. The comparison shows that the calculated spectra are in good agreement with the measured spectra.