Many of the key equipment items for uranium conversion plants are common to several segments of the chemical process industry. For example the types of equipment employed in these processes may include furnaces, rotary kilns, fluidized bed reactors, flame tower reactors, liquid centrifuges, distillation columns and liquid-liquid extraction columns.

This equipment (reactors, heat exchangers, distillation columns and tanks etc.), although rendered harmless, was not fully destroyed in the 1990s, and Iraq had earlier repaired several items of this equipment and had used them for non-proscribed activities at other commercial chemical facilities.