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> Photos of the arrests show a policeman in a ski mask holding a Kalashnikov while Chetrus knelt on a sidewalk in front of the bank. He would eventually be sent

by feld 11y ago

> Photos of the arrests show a policeman in a ski mask holding a Kalashnikov while Chetrus knelt on a sidewalk in front of the bank. He would eventually be sentenced to five years in prison. This guy is involved in the sale of enriched uranium and he gets FIVE YEARS?!

x1798DE 11y ago
It's not like he did something really bad, like illegally access a website.
- SEJeff 11y ago
  Or torrent movies
  - lloydde 11y ago
    I read "torture movies"
gh02t 11y ago
Ten kilos of HEU may or may not be a concern, it's hard to say and I don't see the actual enrichment in the article. "Highly enriched" means any enrichment above 20% enrichment but below "weapons grade" (85%). It usually means something close to 20%... 10 kg of 20% enriched is scary but is a small fraction of what you need to make a bomb, so while it's scary it isn't necessarily that some terrorist group almost bought a pit for a bomb. I expect that has something to do with the apparently light sentence.
- yoodenvranx 11y ago
  What about using this stuff for a dirty bomb?
  - arethuza 11y ago
    HEU isn't that dirty - nothing like as nasty as something as Cobalt 60 which is fairly widely used as a radiation source.
  - gh02t 11y ago
    It's not very radioactive, I've held weapons grade uranium in my hand before (well, it was in a metal container). It is chemically very toxic since it's a heavy metal, very similar to something like arsenic.
- akiselev 11y ago
  From the article: *>> Rockefeller asked then-CIA Director Porter Goss whether enough had vanished from Russia’s stockpile to build a nuclear weapon. “There is sufficient material unaccounted for so that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct a nuclear weapon,” Goss responded. Previously in the article they mentioned that this 10kg of Uranium believed to be for sale on the black market is a fifth of what you would need for a Hiroshima-type weapon but it's just about enough for a well designed implosion nuke. It's not clear whether these statements are connected or if the journalist is making a mistake but Douglas Birch, the coauthor reporting from Russia & Maldova, has been reporting on nuclear issues for the Center of Public Integrity for a few years now.
  - vonmoltke 11y ago
    > Previously in the article they mentioned that this 10kg of Uranium believed to be for sale on the black market is a fifth of what you would need for a Hiroshima-type weapon but it's just about enough for a well designed implosion nuke. With 60kg of HEU I could build Little Boy by myself in my garage with parts I can get at Home Depot and Cabela's. With 10kg of HEU I could build Fat Man with a breeder reactor, a couple hundred thousand in precision machine tools, several tens of thousands in specialty electronics, and a small team of specialists. Both are possible, but one is far more feasible to do than the other for a terrorist group. That said, 10kg in a Little Boy type device would still cause a pretty big boom. The damage from the radiological hysteria that would follow its use would be far greater than the explosive damage, though.
    - gh02t 11y ago
      That estimate for an implosion weapon is a little low by my reckoning, for it to be even remotely in that ballpark it'd require extensive reflection and other trickery. Without doing the math, I'd guesstimate a more realistic number to be about 1/3rd to 1/2 that neededfor a realistic implosion weapon. But an implosion weapon is infinitely more complicated, even if I hand you all the material it just isn't going to happen that someone would be able to build it in their garage. The concept is pretty simple, but there are a lot of little gotchas and also the machining and electrical tolerances are impossibly difficult without very specialized tools even if you had detailed plans. The design for the initiator in particular was notoriously a major problem during the Manhattan project and they really weren't sure if any of the ideas they had would work. Gun-assembled weapons are simpler but still pretty complicated. I'm not sure there would be much benefit to using only 10kg of U-235, which is way subcritical. You'd get a tiny bit of extra boom and some nasty isotopes from the fissions, but strapping some Co-60 to a bomb would probably be more effective. For comparison, Little Boy used around 64 kg, though that was more than the minimum needed.
- jhayward 11y ago
  I believe the 20% threshold was chosen because that represents the largest plant and processing cost step in enrichment. In other words once it is at 20% you can use a much smaller enrichment plant to take it to weapons level due to the nature of the cascade. My back of the envelope calcu-guess is that 20% enriched represents about 95% of the work on the way to weapons grade. [edit: guess based on only isotope ratios, not any specifics of yield of the various enrichment processes]
  - gh02t 11y ago
    The calculations for it are a little weird and involve a rather strange unit called the SWU (separative work unit) and which is actually independent of the separation process, but it works out to be more like ~75% of the effort to go from natural -> 20% enriched as it is to go from 20% -> 95%. You still need the raw mass though. To get enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb (~15kg) from 20% enriched feed stock and discharging 2% enriched depleted uranium waste you need about 65kg of 20% enriched. So 10kg (assuming it's 20%) is definitely concerning, but it's not enough to make a bomb.
    - jhayward 11y ago
      This is a late reply but for posterity readers I was able to learn a lot from this article [1]. I'm still not certain how to interpret the 3rd graph in terms of relative work or cost for the 20% vs 90% enrichment levels. [1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment/ http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/nuclear-fuel-cycle/convers...

by feld 11y ago

x1798DE 11y ago

It's not like he did something really bad, like illegally access a website.

SEJeff 11y ago
Or torrent movies
- lloydde 11y ago
  I read "torture movies"

gh02t 11y ago

Ten kilos of HEU may or may not be a concern, it's hard to say and I don't see the actual enrichment in the article. "Highly enriched" means any enrichment above 20% enrichment but below "weapons grade" (85%). It usually means something close to 20%... 10 kg of 20% enriched is scary but is a small fraction of what you need to make a bomb, so while it's scary it isn't necessarily that some terrorist group almost bought a pit for a bomb. I expect that has something to do with the apparently light sentence.

yoodenvranx 11y ago
What about using this stuff for a dirty bomb?
- arethuza 11y ago
  HEU isn't that dirty - nothing like as nasty as something as Cobalt 60 which is fairly widely used as a radiation source.
- gh02t 11y ago
  It's not very radioactive, I've held weapons grade uranium in my hand before (well, it was in a metal container). It is chemically very toxic since it's a heavy metal, very similar to something like arsenic.
akiselev 11y ago
From the article: *>> Rockefeller asked then-CIA Director Porter Goss whether enough had vanished from Russia’s stockpile to build a nuclear weapon. “There is sufficient material unaccounted for so that it would be possible for those with know-how to construct a nuclear weapon,” Goss responded. Previously in the article they mentioned that this 10kg of Uranium believed to be for sale on the black market is a fifth of what you would need for a Hiroshima-type weapon but it's just about enough for a well designed implosion nuke. It's not clear whether these statements are connected or if the journalist is making a mistake but Douglas Birch, the coauthor reporting from Russia & Maldova, has been reporting on nuclear issues for the Center of Public Integrity for a few years now.
- vonmoltke 11y ago
  > Previously in the article they mentioned that this 10kg of Uranium believed to be for sale on the black market is a fifth of what you would need for a Hiroshima-type weapon but it's just about enough for a well designed implosion nuke. With 60kg of HEU I could build Little Boy by myself in my garage with parts I can get at Home Depot and Cabela's. With 10kg of HEU I could build Fat Man with a breeder reactor, a couple hundred thousand in precision machine tools, several tens of thousands in specialty electronics, and a small team of specialists. Both are possible, but one is far more feasible to do than the other for a terrorist group. That said, 10kg in a Little Boy type device would still cause a pretty big boom. The damage from the radiological hysteria that would follow its use would be far greater than the explosive damage, though.
  - gh02t 11y ago
    That estimate for an implosion weapon is a little low by my reckoning, for it to be even remotely in that ballpark it'd require extensive reflection and other trickery. Without doing the math, I'd guesstimate a more realistic number to be about 1/3rd to 1/2 that neededfor a realistic implosion weapon. But an implosion weapon is infinitely more complicated, even if I hand you all the material it just isn't going to happen that someone would be able to build it in their garage. The concept is pretty simple, but there are a lot of little gotchas and also the machining and electrical tolerances are impossibly difficult without very specialized tools even if you had detailed plans. The design for the initiator in particular was notoriously a major problem during the Manhattan project and they really weren't sure if any of the ideas they had would work. Gun-assembled weapons are simpler but still pretty complicated. I'm not sure there would be much benefit to using only 10kg of U-235, which is way subcritical. You'd get a tiny bit of extra boom and some nasty isotopes from the fissions, but strapping some Co-60 to a bomb would probably be more effective. For comparison, Little Boy used around 64 kg, though that was more than the minimum needed.
jhayward 11y ago
I believe the 20% threshold was chosen because that represents the largest plant and processing cost step in enrichment. In other words once it is at 20% you can use a much smaller enrichment plant to take it to weapons level due to the nature of the cascade. My back of the envelope calcu-guess is that 20% enriched represents about 95% of the work on the way to weapons grade. [edit: guess based on only isotope ratios, not any specifics of yield of the various enrichment processes]
- gh02t 11y ago
  The calculations for it are a little weird and involve a rather strange unit called the SWU (separative work unit) and which is actually independent of the separation process, but it works out to be more like ~75% of the effort to go from natural -> 20% enriched as it is to go from 20% -> 95%. You still need the raw mass though. To get enough weapons-grade uranium for a bomb (~15kg) from 20% enriched feed stock and discharging 2% enriched depleted uranium waste you need about 65kg of 20% enriched. So 10kg (assuming it's 20%) is definitely concerning, but it's not enough to make a bomb.
  - jhayward 11y ago
    This is a late reply but for posterity readers I was able to learn a lot from this article [1]. I'm still not certain how to interpret the 3rd graph in terms of relative work or cost for the 20% vs 90% enrichment levels. [1] http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/nuclear-fuel-cycle/conversion-enrichment-and-fabrication/uranium-enrichment/ http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/nuclear-fuel-cycle/convers...