Iraqi access to uranium ore -- an interesting footnote

The continued attention to Joe Wilson, Valerie Plame and Iraq's alleged interest in Niger's yellowcake uranium ore led me to look for a source that would have something useful to say about the likelihood that Iraqis could have gotten uranium another way -- simply by mining it domestically.

For this purpose the U.S. Geological Service's Minerals Yearbook seemed like a good place to start. All of the issues from 1994 onwards are on the web (click the headline above to go to the right page). Reading them, especially when armed with software (Acrobat Reader) that permits rapid searches for terms like "uranium," revealed some interesting material and raised some new questions.




In the first yearbook available (1994), we find

A uranium mine was reported northeast of Mosul, but no other details were available. Uranium also was recovered from phosphate rock during processing at a fertilizer complex in the west at Al Qaim, but no quantitative data were available.

The table of Iraqi mineral output statistics for that year that is included in the Yearbook has a footnote about uranium (and fluorine) compounds being mined or extracted from phophate ore, but notes that output levels are impossible to estimate.

The 1995 Yearbook contains the same text and footnote in the output table. In 1996 the text disappears, but the footnote is continued. This pattern holds in the 1997, 1998 and 1999 Yearbooks. The 2000 Yearbook contains new text:

Uranium was reportedly recovered in the past from the Akashat phosphate operation (Federation of American Scientists, October 9, 2000, Akashat/Ukashat, accessed June 20, 2001 at URL http://www.fas.org/nuke/guide/iraq/facility/akashat.htm).

In 2001 the word uranium is not mentioned in the Iraq section. It is not mentioned in 2002 either. The only mention of uranium in the 2003 report was in connection with the “attempt” (whether successful or not the report does not say) to ban the import of ferrous military scrap metal from Iraq in that year. Uranium is not mentioned in the 2004 report.

It is certainly relevant to assessing the plausibility of claims that the Iraqis sought uranium ore from Niger to know that they had at least some commerically recoverable deposits on their own soil. It would also be good to know why the Yearbooks' discussion of Iraq exhibits this odd pattern of disclosure and non-disclosure.