Heavy metal lightly guarded in Niger

NIAMEY, Niger — A convoy of flatbed trucks loaded with drums of mined uranium heads south two or three times each week from the Sahara Desert in Niger on a 10-day journey to the port of Cotonou in neighboring Benin.

Two lightly armed Nigerien gendarmes accompany the tarp-covered trucks on their 1,240-mile trip. They have no satellite phones or other ways to communicate in case of trouble. On their prearranged stops for the night, the drivers must notify the mining companies, but they take no special precautions to secure the drums against theft.

This low-grade security for the powder that can be processed into high-grade uranium for nuclear bombs provides a snapshot of how the world’s second-poorest country manages radioactive materials — management under closer scrutiny since the Bush administration accused Iraq of trying to buy uranium here.

A U.N. nuclear agency team plans to visit Niger in the coming months, hoping to speed government approval of an agreement that would permit in-depth monitoring of uranium exports, the Associated Press learned while investigating the country’s uranium trade.

Without this safeguards agreement, the International Atomic Energy Agency can’t require Niger to tighten security and has no authority to inspect production or shipments.

Niger produces lightly processed uranium, or yellowcake — the raw material for enriched uranium used as fuel for nuclear reactors or an atomic bomb.

Few safeguards

Despite global fears that terrorists or so-called rogue nations could acquire ingredients for a bomb, the U.N. agency doesn’t see Niger as a major risk.

Its yellowcake “would require considerable conversion and processing to be usable for nuclear weapons,” agency spokesman Mark Gwozdecky said. “We don’t start tracking this stuff until it’s in a form suitable for reactor fuel.”

The IAEA, based in Vienna, Austria, instead relies on the governments of countries that import uranium shipments from Niger to report to the agency as obligated under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Some analysts say this isn’t enough.

“There are loopholes,” said Larry Scheinman, who was assistant director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency in the Clinton administration. “It’s important to be able to know the transaction flows with respect to yellowcake.”

Companies trading in yellowcake should be required to report all significant shipments so that the IAEA can track where the material is going, said Tom Cochrane, director of the nuclear program at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a Washington-based advocacy group.

The French company Cogema, the biggest shareholder in Niger’s uranium mines, says it reports its shipments “systematically,” but this notification is voluntary under current rules.

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