Thousands of Tonnes of Uranium May Have Left Congo Labeled as Cobalt

For more than two decades, cobalt shipments leaving the Democratic Republic of Congo may have been carrying something nobody was accounting for: uranium.

Researchers modeled the geology, processing chemistry and production volumes across the DRC's Copperbelt, the region that supplies roughly 70 percent of the world's cobalt. Their conclusion, published in Nature Communications, is a quiet gut-punch: an estimated 2,000 to 5,000 tonnes of natural uranium likely left the country inside cobalt-hydroxide shipments between 2000 and 2024. Less than 10 percent of it appears to have been declared to the IAEA, the international body whose entire job is keeping track of uranium.

The reason this happened is geology and chemistry doing what they do. Uranium has been spreading through the Copperbelt for millions of years, carried by rainwater away from concentrated deposits like Shinkolobwe, the mine that supplied much of the Manhattan Project's uranium. Heterogenite, the main cobalt-bearing mineral, grabs uranium as it passes through. And when those ores get processed, cobalt and uranium behave so similarly that separating them requires a deliberate additional step. Only three of the 31 operations the researchers investigated were consistently doing it.

The resulting number is staggering: enough uranium to theoretically yield material for 600 to 1,500 nuclear weapons if further processed and enriched, or to fuel a conventional reactor for 10 to 25 years. Natural uranium is not weapons-ready material, and the study establishes no deliberate transfer. This is geology, not conspiracy. After the study's July publication, the DRC launched a probe of outgoing cobalt shipments.

For 24 years, the uranium may not have been missing at all. It was riding out with the cobalt.

Read the full story at Phys.org, September 10, 2026

Hot Take: Somewhere between "critical mineral supply chain" and "international nuclear safeguards," a few thousand tonnes of uranium apparently went missing. Easy mistake.