Remember the flak over the radioactive yellowcake material that Iraq was said to have tried purchasing from Niger? Well, now the IAEA says that Iraq itself was the souce of scrap yellowcake found in a metal shipment in Amsterdam.
A spokeswoman for the International Atomic Energy Agency said the Rotterdam specimen was scarcely refined at all from natural uranium ore and may have come from a known mine in Iraq that was active before the 1991 Gulf War.
“I wouldn’t hype it too much,” said spokeswoman Melissa Fleming. “It was a small amount and it wasn’t being peddled as a sample.”
No problem there since it’s not the discovery of the sample that concerns me. It’s this part:
Fleming said the agency will compare the chemical composition of the sample to other samples of ore taken from Iraq’s al-Qaim mine, which was bombed in 1991 and dismantled in 1996-97.
She estimated that the Rotterdam sample contained around 5 1/2 pounds of uranium oxide.
Wouldn’t this mean that five and a half pounds of radioactive material have been sitting around Iraq since 1996-97 and the IAEA didn’t know about it?
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Friday, January 16th, 2004, 9:00 am | 
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