24 Jan (NucNet): Uranium first left Africa’s shores for wealthier nations in the 1940s, when the US shipped 30,000 tonnes of it from the Shinkolobwe mine in Katanga province in the Democratic Republic of Congo to be used in the first atomic bombs. In return, the US helped the DRC build Africa’s first nuclear reactor – a research unit at the University of Kinshasa – in 1958.