Uranium hidden in cobalt: the IAEA’s blind spot in Congo
Between 2,000 and 5,000 tonnes of natural uranium left the Democratic Republic of Congo mixed into cobalt, with under a tenth ever declared to the IAEA. Nobody lied about the contents; nobody had looked. What the episode reveals about how nuclear material is tracked.
The fact
On 6 August 2026, the Democratic Republic of Congo opened an investigation into uranium in its cobalt exports. A study in Nature Communications estimates that 2,000 to 5,000 tonnes of natural uranium left the country between 2000 and 2024, mixed into cobalt hydroxide shipped mostly to China. The low end of that range would fuel a one-gigawatt reactor for a decade. Less than a tenth was declared to the International Atomic Energy Agency.
Why it matters
Global nuclear oversight runs on declarations: states report their material, the IAEA verifies what was reported. Here the material travelled labelled cobalt, in sacks priced by the tonne of battery metal. Nobody lied about the contents. Nobody had looked.
The explanation is mundane, which is what makes it awkward. Uranium and cobalt sit together in the rocks of the Katanga copper belt, so mining one carries the other out. But uranium appears nowhere in the sales contract, so no instrument waits at the mine gate. A control only catches what someone has an interest in declaring. An IAEA expert still calls Congo compliant.
Two consequences land immediately. Workers and nearby residents handled radioactive material without knowing it, and Kinshasa has given itself sixty days to assess health and environmental risks. As for the obvious fix, switching supplier, it does not exist: this one country supplies 73% of the world’s cobalt. The answer has to be measurement, not avoidance.
If this cobalt cannot be avoided, it is worth understanding why. Read the Fundamental: “Rare earths and critical materials.”
You’ll learn why the scarcity of these metals is economic rather than geological, how a handful of countries control extraction and refining, and why neither recycling nor new mines will change that in the near term.
Read the Fundamental →
