A small team of UN nuclear experts was traveling to Baghdad yesterday to begin a damage assessment at Iraq's largest nuclear facility, left unguarded by US troops during the early days of the war and then pillaged by villagers.
Iraqi scientists who have surveyed the damage at the Tuwaitha plant said looters left behind piles of uranium and spilled radioactive materials. The scientists cemented over the spilled materials to prevent leakage or further exposure to residents in the area.
The US tried to keep the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) out of postwar Iraq. But it reluctantly agreed to allow the agency's return under pressure from the arms-control community, which was concerned about Tuwaitha's safety and US capability to secure the area and account for its contents.
"The IAEA can best tell what's missing, and they're fully prepared to do that pretty rapidly," said David Albright, an American nuclear expert.
US military commanders acknowledged this week that, after nearly three months on the ground, they remain unequipped to handle the nuclear site.
"I know that the Tuwaitha facility is larger than the assets we have now in country to deal with it," said Lieutenant. General David McKiernan, commander of US ground forces in Iraq.
For more than a decade, the IAEA monitored nearly two tonnes of uranium and radioactive materials tagged at the defunct facility. But the US cut UN inspectors out of the weapons hunt when it went to war without UN backing.
For this trip, the Pentagon limited the number of IAEA staff to seven and said the assessment would have to be completed within two weeks.
The team was originally told it would have to stay at the site in tents set up by the army, but the IAEA said Washington had since agreed to let the team stay at the UN compound in Baghdad.
Pentagon officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the IAEA team would be accompanied at all times by American troops and weapons experts. But IAEA spokeswoman Melissa Fleming said the team would work independently.
"We're not going to conduct any activities with the military," she told The Associated Press.
The Pentagon has also stressed that the IAEA visit would be a one-time event to enforce the nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty -- and not a weapons inspection that might set a precedent for future UN searches for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
Whatever the team finds at Tuwaitha, it will probably be messy.
Dr. Hamed Al-Bahili, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who helped design and open Tuwaitha in 1968, was one of the first on the scene after fleeing Iraqi troops abandoned the site.
Raising his hand 5cm above the linoleum floor in his living room, Al-Bahili said: "The uranium was all over the floor -- all over the ground outside. Piles of it. We poured cement over it inside the rooms because there was no other way to handle it."
Al-Bahili said he pleaded with impoverished villagers in the area not to touch the blue barrels the IAEA had used to store the uranium, "but there were thousands of people -- they just kept coming," he said in an interview on Thursday at his Baghdad home.
Returning to Baghdad, he found Iraqi police who passed on his description of the scene and dangers to advancing US troops.
US troops involved in the hunt for weapons of mass destruction said recently that at least 20 percent of the barrels containing low-grade or natural uranium appeared to be gone.
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