Iraq + yellowcake = ?

July 7, 2008 7:26 PM

Canada just received a huge shipment of uranium from Iraq, wtf?

The Port of Montreal just received a shipment of yellowcake from Iraq.

I am very confused by this; I've read quite a bit about Iraq and WMDs, and the way I understood it was like this:
Saddam was rumoured to have purchased yellowcake uranium from Africa (Niger specifically), and Joseph Wilson was sent to investigate. He found no evidence that Saddam had actually obtained any, and in return for his non-cooperation in the search for WMDs his wife, Valerie Plame, was outed as a CIA spy.

Now, how does this all fit with this huge shipment (550 tonnes), and the fact that we all know there were no WMDs in Iraq?

posted by Vindaloo to law & government (7 comments total)

Relics of the early-80s nuclear program that ended with the Israelis bombing the Osirak reactor.

From the IAEA:

In the period 1979 through 1982, Iraq procured yellowcake from both Portugal and Niger and uranium dioxide from Brazil.

...

The yellowcake procured from Portugal was supplied in two batches. Batch 1, received on 20 June 1980, consisted of 429 drums containing 138,098 kg of yellowcake and batch two, received as three consignments over the period from 17 May 1982 through 20 June 1982, consisted of 487 drums containing 148,348 kg yellow cake. By letters dated 6 August 1981, 1 June 1982 and 21 July 1982, Iraq notified the IAEA of the receipt of this material, which confirmed the complementary notifications received from Portugal at the time of shipment.

In other words, nothing to see there.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 7:36 PM on July 7

From the wikipedia article on the Niger uranium forgeries:

The irony is that the Tuwaitha facility south of Baghdad already possessed yellow cake uranium. Between 1980 and 1982, Iraq procured more than 400 tons of yellowcake from Portugal and Niger which remained in a storage complex close to Tuwaitha. [15] [16] The facility and its yellowcake were monitored and frequently inspected by the International Atomic Energy Agency after the 1991 Gulf War. About 1.8 metric tons of "yellow cake" and 500 tons of unrefined uranium went missing as the Iraqis left Tuwaitha unattended during the war.[17]When the facility was first encountered by U.S. Marines, they thought they had stumbled upon an illegal weapons cache; according to nuclear experts, however, they actually wound up breaking the IAEA seals that are "designed to ensure the materials aren't diverted for weapons use or end up in the wrong hands."[18] The Pentagon dispatched a team to survey the site "after a month of official indecision", finding it heavily looted and said it was impossible to tell whether nuclear materials were missing.[19]

In July of 2008, what was believed to be the last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program, the United States government shipped 550 metric tonnes of concentrated natural uranium or yellowcake to Montreal, Canada. The Iraqi government sold the yellowcake to a Canadian uranium producer, Cameco Corp.[20]

Shorter version: Hussein didn't buy extra yellowcake from Niger, but he still had some left over that folks already knew about.
posted by zamboni at 7:41 PM on July 7

The AP article on the subject says that the yellowcake in question was acquired before the First Gulf War:

Later, U.N. inspectors documented and safeguarded the yellowcake, which had been stored in aging drums and containers since before the 1991 Gulf War. There was no evidence of any yellowcake dating from after 1991, the official said.

posted by Johnny Assay at 7:43 PM on July 7

If I remember right, the yellowcake was "found" in 2005 and it made big headlines at the time because, hey, they found uranium in Iraq. But what was buried in 4th paragraph, if it was reported at all, was that a) the US already knew about this stash and b) it's not refined enough to even be usable in a dirty bomb, let alone WMDs.
posted by lekvar at 7:47 PM on July 7

[removed the news article text dump, include a link in a comment if it's critical to your question please, thanks.]
posted by jessamyn at 7:57 PM on July 7

FYI, from Wikipedia: Uranium is a naturally occurring element that can be found in low levels within all rock, soil, and water... Its average concentration in the Earth's crust is (depending on the reference) 2 to 4 parts per million, or about 40 times as abundant as silver... It is more plentiful than antimony, tin, cadmium, mercury, or silver, and it is about as abundant as arsenic or molybdenum.
posted by neuron at 8:23 PM on July 7

If you're curious as to why Canada, it's because we produce about 30% of the world's uranium, more than anywhere else, and we have a decent amount of nuclear plants + lots of research into reactors that uses not-very-refined uranium (for multiple obvious reasons). So a bit more yellowcake won't go unused.

(For the record, 500 tonnes is not actually huge. It's about 5% of Canada's annual Uranium production, if the numbers I remember are accurate. Not small, but not huge.)
posted by Lemurrhea at 12:47 AM on July 8