Word: tuwaitha
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...rusty drum where Ali Awad stores gasoline. Ali says he bought it from a looter. His neighbors think he took it himself. The 50 gallon drum had been full of heavy yellow powder, Ali recalled, but the looter emptied it onto the floor of the store at the Al Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center one day in mid-April when local people literally dismantled Iraq's largest nuclear site. The powder - or yellow cake - could, however, eventually kill Ali and many other locals. It is mined uranium ready for enrichment. Ali dismisses the talk of danger. ?People here use the barrels...
...looting of Tuwaitha, 12 miles southeast of Baghdad stunned the U.S. forces. In mid May, U.S. and Iraqi officials toured surrounding villages, offering a "one-off" deal to buy back any looted items for $3 each. They recovered about half of the 256 stolen yellow cake barrels. A local Shiite cleric persuaded his parishioners to hand over more looted items, some possibly radioactive. These are piled haphazardly in the courtyard of a disused school, but the imam, who does not recognize the authority of the U.S., refuses to hand them over without the permission of his superiors...
...remaining workers at Al Tuwaitha are upset with U.S. soldiers, whom they fell have failed to protect the center and decontaminate it. A senior engineer, Mehdi Nimaa Tarish, went with a handful of volunteers and laid concrete on the radioactive floor of the store where the yellow cake had been kept, then bricked up its broken windows, he said. The Americans "watched from a safe distance," he said, and gave no assistance...
...Tuwaitha shut down on April 14th and 15th, center workers say. U.S. marines had been in the area since about the 4th, but, the U.S. military maintains, had neither the manpower nor the time to secure the site. In any case, there were no contingency plans to do so, a senior U.S. official told TIME. Planners had concluded that "there was little there in the way of militarily significant radiation sources" in the research center, the official said. "Looting was not expected and you didn't think that looters would go into storage areas with low-level radiation," he added...
Several false leads have emerged. After a group of Marines secured the Tuwaitha nuclear-research complex outside Baghdad, they detected high levels of radiation at the site and speculated that the complex may have contained enough uranium to build nuclear weapons. But weapons experts say that U.N. weapons inspectors sealed the complex more than a decade ago and that it contains "low enriched" uranium good mainly for civilian energy use. Other finds, including 20 medium-range missiles that may have been designed to carry nerve agents and barrels of chemicals seized in an agricultural facility near Karbala, are still under...