Highly Enriched Uranium (for a bomb) easy to get from commercial nuclear reactors
Every nuclear-powered nation on the planet has nuclear material, and not all of it’s under lock and key. Civilian stockpiles in Europe and Japan aren’t staffed by armed guards, nor are most nuclear research reactors on U.S. college campuses. But if you’re looking for a truly easy score, try Russia.
What’s It Take to Build a Nuclear Weapon? | TakePart, by Adam Trunell, 25 June 2010, “…………..The Nuclear Material The most important ingredient in a nuclear bomb is the nuclear stuff itself, which is also the hardest to get. No way can you find nuclear material like plutonium or highly enriched uranium stockpiled in a tool shed behind some half-hearted padlock. Right? Wrong
Every nuclear-powered nation on the planet has nuclear material, and not all of it’s under lock and key. Civilian stockpiles in Europe and Japan aren’t staffed by armed guards, nor are most nuclear research reactors on U.S. college campuses. But if you’re looking for a truly easy score, try Russia.
Russian nuke plants never bothered with a “mass balance” accounting system to keep track of their nuclear material, nor did they pay a decent wage during the Soviet era.
So when Soviet plant employees needed extra cash, they stole office supplies from the job and sold them on the black market. Unfortunately, if their gig was at a nuke plant, the big-ticket office supply was usually plutonium or HEU.
There have been 15 known cases of stolen nuke material over the past 20 years. Every time the goods were traced back to a source, the Soviet bloc was on the return address. In all of those cases, the recovered nuclear material wasn’t known to be missing until it was found, and the bust itself came about mostly by luck.
That means if you’re al-Qaeda, and you’re out looking for HEU, it’s only a matter of time before you find it, and just a matter of bad luck if you get caught.
Russia, by the way, holds onto about 200 tons of plutonium. It only took six kilograms of the stuff to level Nagasaki in 1945………….
How much Highly Enriched Uranium can a terrorist get for nine large?
In 1994, Osama bin Laden bought a three-foot cylinder of weapons-grade uranium from a Sudanese military officer for $1.5 million. Fortunately for mankind, bin Laden got bamboozled on the sale, and the cylinder turned out to be a fake. The price, however, serves a good indicator of what terrorists would cough up for a little nuke material……..
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