Bellona nuclear digest. March 2024
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
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Publish date: January 30, 2007
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Georgia announced last week that in February 2006 a Russian citizen was arrested and jailed for trying to sell 100 grams of highly enriched uranium-235 to Islamist extremists. Russia called the announcement a provocative act.
Documents from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) seen by Reuters suggested the uranium may have come from the Russian city of Novosibirsk in Siberia. “The Russian Prosecutor-General has asked for copies of documents (from Georgia) to start checks, and to consider launching a criminal case on the illegal purchase and holding of radioactive substances,” the spokesman said.
Highly enriched uranium in big enough quantities can be used to make a nuclear bomb.
A senior Georgian government official told Reuters yesterday a similar nuclear smuggling case occurred in 2003. Shota Utiashvili, head of the Interior ministry’s information and analytical section, said border guards then caught an Armenian man trying to smuggle 170 grams of highly enriched uranium-235 across the Armenia-Georgia border. “According to our information the uranium was bought from Russia,” he said. Utiashvili said the man was handed over to the Armenian police but he was unaware what had happened to him after that.
A survey of events in the field of nuclear and radiation safety relating to Russia and Ukraine.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has told the United Nations atomic energy watchdog that Russia plans to restart Ukraine’s embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, currently occupied by Russian troops and technicians, fueling worries about a serious nuclear accident on the front lines of a grinding military conflict.
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Recent attacks on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant "mark the beginning of a new and gravely dangerous front of the war," the UN atomic agency's director general said last week.