WikiLeaks: Africa Offers Easy Uranium

Wikileaks cables have revealed a disturbing development in the African uranium mining industry: abysmal safety and security standards in the mines, nuclear research centres, and border customs are enabling international companies to exploit the mines and smuggle dangerous radioactive material across continents.

The Wikileaks cables reveal that U.S. diplomats posted in a number of African countries - the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Tanzania, Niger, and Burundi, among others - have had direct knowledge of the poor safety and security standards in these countries' uranium and nuclear facilities.

The cables also highlight the involvement of European, Chinese, Indian, and South Korean companies in the illegal extraction and smuggling of uranium from Africa. Most European nuclear reactors use uranium imported from African countries.

In one classified document, dated Sep. 8, 2006, the U.S. embassy in the DRC capital Kinshasa reported that several U.S. diplomats and security service personnel toured the Kinshasa Nuclear Research Centre (CREN-K) on Jul. 27 that year in order to assess the facility’s security needs.

CREN-K houses the DRC’s two nuclear reactors. Neither reactor is currently functioning, but staff conduct nuclear-related research and teaching at the facility.

Although inactive, CREN-K stores significant amounts of uranium and nuclear waste. This radioactive material includes 138 nuclear fuel rods, at least 15 kg of enriched and non-enriched uranium, and some 23 kg of nuclear waste.

At CREN-K, "external and internal security is poor, leaving the facility vulnerable to theft," Roger A. Meece, U.S. ambassador to DRC, reported in the 2006 document.

Meece's detailed description of the security measures at CREN-K suggests that security is not just "poor," but non-existent. According to the report, the fence surrounding CREN-K "is not lit at night, has no razor-wire across the top, and is not monitored by video surveillance.

"There are numerous holes in the fence, and large gaps where the fence was missing altogether," Meece wrote.

"University of Kinshasa students frequently walk through the fence to cut across CREN-K, and subsistence farmers grow manioc on the facility next to the nuclear waste storage building," he added...

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Julio Godoy @'truth-out'

If anyone is trying to tell you that the nuclear industry is "SAFE" and "GREEN" they have obviously been spending too much time wandering around this facility in Kinshasa and their brains have been radioactively melted. The complicity/complacency of such "august" governments/companies in this ecological nightmare verges on insanity, and places the whole world at risk by these "eco-deniers", let alone the interminable legacy for the people of Africa.