Illegal uranium mining at shuttered Congo site -UN | World News | Reuters.co.uk:Do not get me wrong. This is our uranium, we should be able to do whatever we want with it, within the limitations of the treaties we have ratified. That said, it is still immensly troubling. when we know how proliferators are dealt with these days...
By Irwin Arieff
"UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - Uranium is being mined illegally at a site in Congo that provided the radioactive material for the U.S. atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945, U.N. experts reported on Thursday.
The Shinkolobwe mine in mineral-rich Katanga province in southwestern Congo was ordered shut down by U.N. investigators in 2004 who found it unsafe to operate.
The investigators, sent in after a partial collapse of the mine killed eight people that year, concluded it was likely to collapse further and miners were in danger of chronic exposure to radiation.
But a team of experts monitoring a U.N. arms embargo on the Democratic Republic of Congo said they found ample signs of 'artisan mining' by small groups of private individuals during a recent visit.
Local police and residents told them 'local agents of the mining police and of the National Intelligence Agency not only encourage but also charge fees from the miners,' the experts said in a report to the U.N. Security Council."
Read the full article, it's worth it.
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Check out the debate on the Congolese election at blog.washingtonpost.com/postglobal
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