A scrap-metal facility in the Netherlands has found what could be traces of uranium yellowcake on steel from Iraq. The nature and origin of the material is as yet unknown, but finding nearly 2 pounds of uranium oxide is hardly normal – it has no common industrial or medical uses. However, the material only contains a small amount of weapons-grade material and would need significant processing to be useful in weapons.
If the material didn’t come from Iraq, the question is where did it come from and how did it come to contain radioactive material?
Depleted uranium, maybe? Would it leave uranium oxide when it strikes vehicles? And might those vehicles have been turned into scrap?
Why would Iraq have uranium oxide if it’s useless for nuclear weapons?
Yellowcake can be refined into weapons grade material by using centrifuges to separate out the U-235 from the heavier U-238. We know that Hussein had preserved the technical expertise to create such centrifuges, although it’s highly unlikely he had anything significant built after the 1992 war and the 1998 Desert Fox bombing campaign.
So this was leftovers from a weapons program made useless by our bombing, maybe?