The United Nations nuclear watchdog said today it had accounted for most of the looted nuclear material at Iraq's main nuclear facility, but at least 10 kg of low-grade uranium may have been dispersed.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) announced these conclusions in a report sent to the UN Security Council yesterday about its inspection of the Location C storage facility outside of the Tuwaitha complex near Baghdad.
In the post-war chaos in Iraq, looters broke into Tuwaitha's Location C and at least six other nuclear sites in Iraq and emptied out the contents of hundreds of containers of nuclear material. Most of the material and containers were recovered.
"The quantity and type of uranium compounds dispersed are not sensitive from a proliferation point of view," IAEA Director General Dr Mohamed ElBaradei wrote in the report.
The term "proliferation" refers to the possibility of a country or group using these uranium compounds to make nuclear weapons.
This low-grade natural uranium would also be of little use in a so-called dirty bomb, which is the dispersion of radioactive material over a wide area with a conventional explosive like dynamite.
But Dr ElBaradei said he would "request the (US occupation) authority to make every effort to recover the dispersed material and, if and when the material is recovered, to return it to Location C...and to place it under agency safeguards".
Dr ElBaradei also called on the US and British occupation authorities "to ensure the physical protection and security of the entire nuclear material inventory in Iraq".
Most of this nuclear material at other facilities had been "previously recovered from rubble", Dr ElBaradei said.