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The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) says it will investigate reports that uranium has been detected in cobalt shipments exported to China.
The announcement follows a late-July investigation published in Nature Communications in collaboration with the Financial Times and Lighthouse Reports, which alleged that Chinese companies had extracted and exported cobalt hydroxide containing significant levels of uranium from the mineral-rich country. The companies named in the report have denied the allegations.
In a statement published on Friday, the Congolese authorities denied they had violated the DRC’s international commitments, insisting that the radioactive metal’s presence in the southeast’s copper and cobalt veins was a “natural” and “well-documented” phenomenon.
The government insisted that “the study in question is not based on direct measurements carried out on exported shipments”.
Authorities said they would consult the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and conduct tests through both a national laboratory and an accredited international laboratory to establish whether uranium was present in exported cobalt.
The DRC is one of the world’s leading sources of critical minerals and has become a key battleground in efforts by China and the United States to secure access to strategic resources.
The country supplies about 68 per cent of global cobalt and produced 3.4 million tonnes of copper in 2025, making it Africa’s largest copper producer. China receives the vast majority of the DRC’s cobalt exports.
The issue has drawn attention to the country’s mining sector, which has long faced allegations of corruption and has also played a role in some of the DRC’s prolonged conflicts.
The DRC is also historically associated with uranium mining. Its Shinkolobwe mine supplied the uranium used in the US atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, but the mine has been closed for years.
