This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The southern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is known as the Copperbelt because of its rich deposits of copper and other minerals. The area was the original source of uranium ore for the first nuclear weapons built by the U.S.'s Manhattan Project, which ran from 1942 to 1947.
Two atomic bombs were then dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The Manhattan Project's main source of uranium was the Copperbelt's Shinkolobwe mine in southeastern DRC. It has been officially closed to excavation since 2004.
The DRC hasn't officially reported any uranium exports in decades. However, our recent research shows that substantial unreported quantities of uranium are likely to be leaving the country today. I am a geologist with expertise in analyzing data on the chemical and mineral contents of rocks.
I do most of my work using map views, taking in spatial data points—like regional cobalt statistics—and drawing conclusions. Our research is the first to systematically take two crucial factors into account: Uranium and cobalt occur together in rock and respond the same way to chemical processing, so they are hard to separate. From this, we were able to develop a single estimate of how much uranium is at stake when cobalt is mined and exported.
Very few data points about uranium concentrations in ores or the chemical steps used to prepare cobalt for shipment are publicly available. We reached our estimates by using geologic maps to model the likely uranium grades in cobalt ores. We combined these grades with the amount of ore being processed at each facility in the Copperbelt and a model of uranium behavior during processing chemistry before shipment.
The end result links cobalt production to likely uranium export. Our calculations show that, in the most likely scenarios, 2,000–5,000 tonnes of natural uranium were exported from the DRC in cobalt-hydroxide shipments between 2000 and 2024. Less than 10% of this material appears to have been publicly declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
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