Nuclear material worth $72M seized in a car in Turkey

Nuclear smuggling is relatively commonplace. I can recommend the book "Nuclear Forensic Analysis" by Ian D. Hutcheon, Kenton J. Moody, and Patrick M. Grant for those who are interested in the details. Minor quantities of genuine nuclear materials (tens of grams of plutonium) are seized at borders about once per year. Cases dealing with major (kilogram) quantities seem to be classified, but I have little doubt they exist.

> a whopping 1.4 kilograms (3.1 pounds) of a substance, believed to be Californium

That's preposterous. Californium is not naturally occurring and costs tens of $M per gram to produce. Anyone who paid attention in high school should see big flashing alarms when reading a claim like that.

Quoting the source of that story:

"According to Monday's NTV article, the suspects were reportedly in possession of a cache of Californium weighing 1.441 kilograms that they planned to sell for $72 million on the black market."

So, back in 2018, suspects were trying to sell 1.4 kg of a substance claimed to be Californium for $72 million.

Now, in 2019, suspects were trying to sell a mere 18.1 grams of a substance claimed to be Californium, again, for $72 million.

I am trying to imagine a gang of schmucks still trying to sell baking soda as Californium but now they adjusted the price to be more realistic.

>> Turks have seized about 66 years of production.

Or we have lost some information in the reporting. Possibly this is 18 grams of something that has tested positive for californium. That is different than 18 grams of pure californium. I'm not sure what testing they did, but i doubt they verified every atom.

There is likely a large amount of, for lack of the correct word, filler. When dealing with very precious substances it is not unusual to combine them with other easily removed and inert material to facilitate handling. When dealing with nuclear material, this reduction in the density of the radioactive stuff is a significant safety advantage. This could be 1% or less californium and 99+% filler ... still a significant find but not evidence of a clandestine production line.

Probably because it's fake news. This format pops up every once in a while, "The police seized x amount of y nuclear material worth z million dollars". It's usually Californium or phosphorus...

This is from the last year and even has photos: http://www.hurriyet.com.tr/gundem/ankarada-nukleer-madde-ope...

Does this look like a Californium to you?

look at the domain name.

That amount seems suspicious to me too, as does the fact that it was being transported in just a bag. I wonder if it will turn out like the previous large bust that is mentioned in the article.

>In March 2018, police in Ankara seized a whopping 1.4 kilograms (3.1 pounds) of a substance, believed to be Californium, in a car following a tipoff. That time, however, the substance turned out to be organic with no nuclear or radioactive properties.

That's for 1 gram of Cf-252. Cf-251 is about 400 times more stable according to that Wikipedia page. It's still out of the question that anyone is driving round with 18 grams of any isotope of it, much less 1.4 kg. The documented world production is less than 0.5g per year.

Thats safe transportation for avoidance of accidents. If I was smuggling this stuff, I'd use a mule, and I'd pick one who had no consciousness of how dangerous the materials were, and I'd avoid contact with them directly.

I probably wouldn't care about the crash risk: if the cleanup crew is decontaminating a border crossing down south, I can get through up north with the other 1g.

Also, if the mule dies more than 72hrs later, I don't have to bother disposing of the mule.

If you publish the airport thriller, I declare my interest (c)

You are right, it sounds ridiculous. Also as others have posted, the documented worldwide yearly production of the stuff is only 0.5g.

Was this before or after North Korea, with an economy around the size of Botswana or Afghanistan, assembled a nuclear arsenal?

With stories like these, there's usually SIGINT involved, and a traffic violation is the pretext for the "random pullover".

Neutron detectors. They are installed in many public places, customs, truck scanning areas, airports etc. -- specifically to prevent nuclear materials smuggling.

This one was easy -- californium is the among the most intensive neutron sources, and 18g is a _huge_ amount of it. Any neutron detector worthy of its name should have raised the alarm.

It is a startup neutron source for nuclear reactors. It won't work as a neutron initiator in nuclear weapons (since you can't regulate its neutron flux), but it has the immense research value for criticality experiments if you are running your own nuclear program.

P.S. you can't build a nuclear weapon out of californium, at all. To achieve the nuclear explosion, you need to assemble the supercritical configuration (minimum necessary k_eff about 1.53 for plutonium) without any stray neutrons leading to premature initiation, then, at the precise moment, inject neutrons in the system (even a single neutron is enough) to start the runaway chain reaction. Californium excels at spontaneous fission; there are so many neutrons in the system at any time, that premature initiation is guaranteed.

It says you need nuclear reactor and particle accelerator. I guess entry to barrier is sort of high.

I can only assume the same way most rare items are priced - whatever the buyer and seller negotiate. The other option might be auction, but this doesn't exactly work for nuclear materials.