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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.
Anatoly Bushuev, Alexander Kozhin, Viktor Zubarev, Tatiana Aleeva, Ekaterina Petrova, Anatoly Myrzin, Alexey Syrosev, Genadiy Vlaskin, Timur Ragimov, Valentin Timoshin, Andrey Samoilov
Nuclear Technology | Volume 170 | Number 2 | May 2010 | Pages 353-359
Technical Paper | Human Factors | doi.org/10.13182/NT10-A9488
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
This paper presents a nondestructive methodology for the determination of mass and isotopic composition of large plutonium samples. The methodology is based on experimental data from measurements of gamma radiation emitted by plutonium samples under assay. Both plutonium mass and plutonium isotopic composition are derived from one experimental gamma spectrum in two energy ranges. Gamma spectrum in the middle-energy range is used for the determination of plutonium isotopic composition from experimental intensities of photo peaks belonging to different plutonium isotopes. Gamma spectrum in the high-energy range contains photo peaks of spontaneous fission products, and these data can be used for the determination of plutonium mass. The calibration curve for dependence of the count rates in photo peaks of spontaneous fission products on effective 240Pu mass was plotted based on experimental data for the enterprise-level reference plutonium samples. When processing experimental data, some corrections were introduced to account for self-absorption of gamma radiation in the plutonium samples and for neutron-induced fission reactions. The correction factors were calculated with the application of Monte Carlo methodology. The final relative errors in the determination of plutonium dioxide mass were within the range of (4 to 10)% (1) for nuclear material containers with different cooling times and different isotopic compositions of plutonium.