Three Chinese citizens have been arrested in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, while attempting to illegally purchase 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of uranium, the country’s State Security Service said Saturday.
The suspects planned to transport the nuclear material to China through Russia, the security service said in a statement, while also releasing video footage of the detention operation.
“Three Chinese citizens have been detained in Tbilisi while attempting to illegally purchase 2 kilograms of nuclear material — uranium,” the agency said, adding that members of the criminal group planned to pay $400,000 (344,000 euros) for the radioactive material.
According to the authorities, a Chinese citizen already in Georgia, who was in breach of Georgian visa regulations, brought experts to Georgia to search for uranium throughout the country.
I suspect this is highly dependent on the level of enrichment of said uranium.
Even buying it piecemeal in dinkum quantities from scientific suppliers as a private customer, I’m seeing depleted uranium — i.e., 99.9% U238 and not realistically fissile material — priced at $32.50 per gram online. 2 kilos of that would thus be $65,000. Although I’ll be damned if I know just what the hell you’d do with the stuff.
I reckon weapons grade would run you just a smidgen more than that.
Stupid question and not the right place probably, but how do you exactly enrich uranium in order to have the 235 isotope?
Technology
Huh, I knew the plants used for enrichment were called centrifuges but for some reason I always assumed they were not literal centrifuges. Neat.
Lots of tall boys in series
I’m not sure if it’s done differently now, but historically, you’d use a bunch of gas centrifuges in series to separate the isotopes based on molecular weight. Each time you run it through the process, you end up with a higher concentration of the 235 isotope. The heavier 238 isotope then gets repurposed in armor piercing munitions.
Nice try Khamenei
You separate out the isotopes. You don’t create U-235, but rather you extract the fissile isotope from your sample. There’s only a limited amount of the stuff in the world and the majority of uranium still buried (and in fact, the majority of it at all) is non-fissile U-238. Only something like 0.7% of the uranium in the world is U-235.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium