Leslie Hook
speaker
25 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 31 Jul
Leslie Hook’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, uranium is naturally occurring across the southern part of the DRC.
In fact, one of the world's highest grade uranium mines is there and produced the material that was used in the atom bombs in World War II.
Now, that mine is long since closed, but uranium is naturally occurring in the region and is often mingled with cobalt and copper.
Cobalt occurs alongside other metals and has to be processed several times before it's used.
Well, there's new scientific research that shows that the amount of uranium contained in the DRC's cobalt exports inadvertently at low grades actually amounts to a lot of uranium.
This new research paper calculates that at least 2,000 tons of uranium left the country.
Now that's enough to run a large nuclear reactor for about a decade if it was enriched.
So it's a pretty significant amount.
Now, some officials and experts are worried this could be a means of smuggling nuclear material or at a minimum, a blind spot in the supply chain for uranium.
Most of this cobalt is exported in the form of cobalt hydroxide.
And the biggest processor of cobalt is China, which is also the world's biggest battery maker.
And China is, of course, a nuclear power.
They have a very large fleet of nuclear reactors as well as nuclear weapons.
And we don't really know what happens to the uranium once it gets to China.
It could be processed out of the cobalt, removed from the cobalt and end up in the waste heaps, or it could be extracted and used as a metal.
So we don't know the answer, but a lot of people are certainly asking that question.
Well, DRC officials have been working for decades to control the naturally occurring radioactive material in the country.
But the cobalt issue is kind of new.
Cobalt production has really surged in the past decade with the rise of electric vehicles.
So this is kind of a new channel to be worried about.
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