UN mission denied access to collapsed uranium mine

A team from the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), known by its French acronym MONUC, was prevented on Friday from accessing the site of a uranium mine in Shinkolobwe - in the southeastern province of Katanga - where several miners were killed or injured when the mine collapsed on 8 July, a MONUC spokesman told IRIN. "The MONUC delegation had gone to determine what medical and humanitarian aid we could provide... but the district authorities of Haut Katanga told us we were not authorised to access the mine because we didn't warn them in advance of our arrival and, according to them, we had nothing to do with this affair," Alexandre Essome, the MONUC spokesman, said on Friday. The MONUC team comprised humanitarian experts, emergency medical specialists and geologists. Essome reported that their objective was to evaluate the health risks posed by the mine that once supplied the raw uranium used to build the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by American forces during World War II. "Our geological experts established that the mine does present an irradiation danger," he said. The mine was flooded by the Belgian government in 1956 and kept under guard by the Congolese army until 1997. After 1997, a lapse in surveillance enabled thousands of freelance workers to illegally resume exploiting the mine, which is also rich in cobalt. The presence of uranium posed a serious threat of irradiation to the estimated 15,000 workers who entered the mine on a daily basis, Prof Loris Nda Bar Tung, a geologist at the University of Lubumbashi, told IRIN. Nda Bar Tung measured the levels of radioactivity in the mine and the surrounding areas, and found them to be between 10,000 and 15,000 hits per second. "This means that there is a very serious danger for the workers and also their families living on the site... because a level of 100 hits per second is already dangerous," he said. Several families, including pregnant women and children, live on the site. Some of the miners work stripped to the waist for more then 24 hours at a time in the underground chambers without any protection. Nda Bar Tung told IRIN that exposure to such levels of radiation could lead to lung cancer, sterility and birth defects. In light of the public health risk, "MONUC recommended that the mine be secured and handed over to a private business so that exploitation could be undertaken under more disciplined conditions, and illegal trafficking of uranium could be avoided," Essome said on Tuesday. However, a diplomat, who spoke to IRIN on condition of anonymity, said on Tuesday that the mine in Shinkolobwe "did not present an opportunity for the trafficking of uranium, because only small quantities of the metal were present in the mine, despite the radiation level". The Congolese minister for mines, Eugène Diomi Ndongala, presented a report on Friday saying seven people had been killed by the mine's collapse. However, several miners said the actual number of deaths could be higher.