But not Shinkolobwe. The managers feared that such a lethal substance would fall into the wrong hands. They poured concrete into the shafts and carted off the equipment. Scavengers tore the metal from the uranium warehouses. The worker’s village was evacuated and sealed off, and weeds began to sprout inside the shells of brick townhouses. Mango trees drooped, nodded and eventually toppled onto the deserted streets. Shinkolobwe crept back, day after day, into a state of nature.
The place does not appear on most local maps, but is not difficult to find. I hired a translator and we rented a Toyota Land Cruiser for a few hundred dollars in the city of Lubumbashi, once called Elisabethville, the principal railhead for most of the ore trains that used to run to the Atlantic. The city’s economy still thrives on minerals, both legal and bootleg. Chinese companies have established a strong presence as buyers of the copper and cobalt picked out of the open pits.
We left the city at dawn and headed north, on a potholed national highway that faded into dirt, through forests of eucalyptus and acacia. My translator turned onto a rutted side track in the hilly country north of Likasi and we quickly got bogged down in the mud. A farmer came to help push us out; a man named Alphonse Ngoy Somwe, who told us that he had worked as a miner at Shinkolobwe, where copper was usually the big thing. There had been at least one time, however, when he had looked for uranium. A few years ago, he recalled, some white men had come to buy their ore and had waved electronic devices over the rocks. He said he didn’t want to do mining anymore – “it kills” – but after we pushed the Toyota loose, he agreed to show us the way.
We bounced through a small village with a Pentecostal church made out of poles and grass and, shortly thereafter, came to a spot where the road took a plunge into a rocky valley; too precipitous for the Land Cruiser to handle.
Sowme told us the mine was about seven kilometers further. I shouldered my pack and we all started walking.
A substantial amount of uranium has been smuggled out of Congo in the last decade, and the source is almost certainly Shinkolobwe.
In October of 2005, a customs official in Tanzania made a routine inspection of a long-haul truck carrying several barrels of a metal called columbite-tantalite, otherwise known as coltan, a rare metal used in the manufacture of laptop computers and cell phones and other electronic goods. But he found a lode of unfamiliar black grit instead.
One of his bosses later recalled the scene to a reporter: “There were several containers due to be shipped and they were all routinely scanned with a Geiger counter. This one was very radioactive. When we opened the container it was full of drums of coltan. Each drum contains about fifty kilograms of ore. When the first and second rows were removed, the ones after that were found to be drums of uranium.” A United Nations panel came in to investigate and concluded the source of both shipments had been illegal mining at Shinkolobwe.
The clandestine mining of uranium is not hard to conceal in the midst of so much other petty corruption. In most of Union Minière’s abandoned pits, there is an active hunt for what is called “Congo caviar” – the rich mineral blend of cobalt and copper harvested by scavengers and purchased by speculators. This activity is supposed to be illegal, but it has been widely tolerated for more than a decade. The miners work in T-shirts and flip-flops and dig out the chunks of caviar with shovels, picks and their bare hands. Approximately 50,000 to 70,000 people are doing this on any given day. The cobalt is particularly prized and fetches high prices. It is a vital metal in the construction of jet engines and turbines. Energy-hungry China is a primary buyer. But in the majority of cases the minerals leave the country illegally, without being recorded and without being taxed. The usual route is through Zambia. And at every step in this unofficial process, from the mine to the border, successive layers of police and inspectors demand a cut.
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20 Comments
Add CommentThis is a great story! Thanks!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNuklear energie, Nein Danke
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisvery good informative article
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery interesting. Maybe it's in the book, but I was waiting to read about the actual radiation levels in and around the cave. I'm sure he didn't go there without a geigercounter...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"We were there for several minutes before I realized that I still had the letter of authorization from the police official in my backpack. I hadnt needed to withdraw it because we hadnt encountered a single roadblock. Nobody was guarding Shinkolobwe. We had walked right in."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTranslation: I was conned by a corrupt cop.
Very interesting exerpt. I was already intrigued by the book before reading this, now I know I really want to read this book.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSooo...Does that mean i can buy Uranium on Craigslist lol? Obviously just being facetious but somebody malicious might be doing that this very minute!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI guess you can... @ http://www.unitednuclear.com/ It looks like it's not a joke but that they actually do business.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhere is the science?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAh..the safest energy source on the planet!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt what point does the intenational community say "this resource is unable to be managed by the corrupt and greedy legacy of the Belgian colonialists and their spawn now in charge (the greed just comes with the poverty of spirit so equally abundant in human nature) and so the UN will oust the current regime and return to them a country where certain activities will not be administerd by the soveriegn itself but by international oversight." The sooner the better. As instabilities in national security arises, it will become a more and more unavoidable measure...and who knows, maybe it will result in a future Congo that is not all screwed up by its collective ignorance and obsession with personal power.
The book should be required reading for everyone in the world. Another fine example of destruction from beneath the ground on up. Seems not one major country has had radio-active free hands. And it seems the Chinese are Africa's favorite client or is that baron these days? They are wood pulping their arses off there now, destroying forests. What's next? I see them importing Chinese people by the province.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisdoug 1 said "At what point does the inte[r]national community say ""this resource is unable to be managed by the corrupt and greedy legacy of the Belgian colonialists and their spawn now in charge (the greed just comes with the poverty of spirit so equally abundant in human nature) and so the UN will oust the current regime and return to them a country where certain activities will not be administerd by the soveriegn itself but by international oversight.""
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to say this is unlikely, that the UN could, possibly, make a moral resolution condemning what's going on there and that the regime is not going to be removed, but will never act on it, and then at some point the US could sign this into law, but not act on it, and then when a president finally does he'll be blamed for not consulting the world and UN which condemns the intervention they themselves helped draft resolutions upon, and which his predecessor signed into law.
doug 1 said "At what point does the inte[r]national community say ""this resource is unable to be managed by the corrupt and greedy legacy of the Belgian colonialists and their spawn now in charge (the greed just comes with the poverty of spirit so equally abundant in human nature) and so the UN will oust the current regime and return to them a country where certain activities will not be administerd by the soveriegn itself but by international oversight.""
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would like to say this is unlikely, that the UN could, possibly, make a moral resolution condemning what's going on there and that the regime is not going to be removed, but will never act on it, and then at some point the US could sign this into law, but not act on it, and then when a president finally does he'll be blamed for not consulting the world and UN which condemns the intervention they themselves helped draft resolutions upon, and which his predecessor signed into law.
The poor planet earth must be silently wailing over the fact it gave birth to the wicked and voracious predator called human beings. This species arrogantly believes itself to be the most intelligent animal, but ironically it is the only life form that has been surreptitiously dragging itself to mass-suicide in not so a distant future.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a geologist and a mining company executive, and having worked for the past 9 years in the African mining business, I can tell you that Zoellner is factually cahallenged and is also straining, through inuindo, misinterpretation of facts and implications, to fabricate the notion that that there is something sinister and mysterious about mining in the Congo. Abandoned mines are found all aross the world and there is nothing special about them . An abandoned mine is simply an abandoned hole in the ground no matter where it is.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSmall scale local miners ("galemsey") work in every mining district in Africa both active and abandoned. If there was uranium worth mining (even at galemse wages) at Shinkolobwe there would have been a large contingent of galemse there. If there was no one working the day of his tour, there is no no uranuim left - period.
Also note that galemse are never going to produce the huge tonnages of ore that are requred to support the develoment of a nation's nuclear weapons program. U235 constitutes less that 1% of the urnium atoms in the ore and the uranium atoms typically constitute less that 1% of the ore, and ore tyically constitutes less than 10 to 20% of the rock that must be moved to get the ore. And since the Shinkolobwe deposit has been mined out and abandoned, the uranium grade is probably extremetly low. A few barrels of low grade ore grabbed by a galemse is never going to pose a threat o anyone, even a truck load of barrels full of uranium ore is a drop in the bucket of what is needed to develope a weapons program.
His tory is simply an romatic account of being swindled by the Congolese while traveling about Africa. No facts nor information otherwise in his story.
Is the author for real, or a sensationalist? I saw him interviewed by John Stewart (who was flippant, as expected) but was surprised at the equally flippant and misleading responses. He looks to me like a quickie biography specialist, not someone with in depth knowledge of the subject.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFascinating. It is interesting that a Google Earth search does not locate a place with the name Shinkolobwe. Considering the historical and potentially dangerous significance of Shinkolobwe, it is surprising that there is no listing. Is there another geographic name?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDavid
The mine can clearly be seen on Google Earth at 11 degrees 02 minutes 59.53 seconds North and 26 degrees, 32 minutes and 52.79 seconds East. The imagery is of high quality, which is sort of odd in the middle of nowhere, except of course when there is a uranium mine to watch.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfufu
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is disgraceful that mining companies are not made to restore land into a fit condition after abandonning workings. The cost of doing this should be included in the unit cost of nuclear-powered electricity. If this were so, such countries as France would soon think twice about building new reactors...
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