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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.
H. Nakashima, Y. Sakamoto, Y. Iwamoto, N. Matsuda, Y. Kasugai, Y. Nakane, F. Masukawa, N. V. Mokhov, A. F. Leveling, D. J. Boehnlein, K. Vaziri, T. Sanami, H. Matsumura, M. Hagiwara, H. Iwase, N. Kinoshita, H. Hirayama, K. Oishi, T. Nakamura, H. Arakawa, N. Shigyo, K. Ishibashi, H. Yashima, N. Nakao, K. Niita
Nuclear Technology | Volume 168 | Number 2 | November 2009 | Pages 482-486
Shielding | 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/NT09-A9229
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Experimental studies of shielding and radiation effects are carried out at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (FNAL) under collaboration between FNAL and Japan, aiming at benchmarking simulation codes and studying irradiation effects for the upgrade and design of new high-energy accelerator facilities. The purposes of this collaboration are (a) acquisition of shielding data in a proton beam energy region above 100 GeV, (b) further evaluation of predictive accuracy of the PHITS and MARS codes, (c) modification of physics models and data in these codes if needed, (d) characterization of radiation fields for studies of radiation effects, and (e) development of a code module for an improved description of radiation effects.The first campaign of the experiment was carried out at the Pbar target station and NuMI experimental station at FNAL, which use irradiation of targets with 120-GeV protons for antiproton and neutrino production, respectively. The generated secondary particles passing through steel, concrete, and rock were measured by activation methods as well as by other detectors such as a scintillator with a veto counter, phoswich detector, and a Bonner ball counter on trial. Preliminary experimental and calculated results are presented.