In an Associate Press exclusive, Brian Murphy details how a secret American-Iraqi operation has been carried out over the past three months to remove from Iraq more than 550 metric tons of "Yellowcake Uranium," amid fears that the stuff might fall into the hands of terrorists.
The yellowcake in question is now safely in Canada, sold by the Iraqi government to Canadian Cameco Corporation, for use in the production of nuclear energy. Cameco is desribed to have paid the Iraqi government "tens of millions of dollars" for the uranium.
The revelation of the cache of yellowcake might finally put to rest the questions surrounding former ambassador Joe Wilson, and his report that Saddam Hussein never sought the substance in the African country of Niger.
The fallout from the Joe Wilson/Valery Plame case led to Congressional investigations of the Bush Adminstration, amid claims that the Vice President was behind discrediting Wilson's story.
While the yellowcake has finally been removed from harm's way in Iraq, the cleanup of the former nuclear facility remains.
Last month, a team of Iraqi nuclear experts completed training in the Ukrainian ghost town of Pripyat, which once housed the Chernobyl workers before the deadly meltdown in 1986, said an IAEA official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decontamination plan has not yet been publicly announced.
But the job ahead is enormous, complicated by digging out radioactive "hot zones" entombed in concrete during Saddam's rule, said the IAEA official. Last year, an IAEA safety expert, Dennis Reisenweaver, predicted the cleanup could take "many years."
Fighting for conservatism one day at a time.