US Attorney: Nuclear Material Trafficking Charges Against Japanese Yakuza Leader | Hacker News Reader

US Attorney: Nuclear Material Trafficking Charges Against Japanese Yakuza Leader

justice.gov

39 pointsNN888 comments

I initially guessed that this would be a "technically true" claim that proves underwhelming upon further inspection [1]. But no! The claim includes trafficking in weapons grade plutonium.

In the course of this conspiracy, EBISAWA and his confederates showed samples of nuclear materials in Thailand to a DEA undercover agent (“UC-1”), who was posing as a narcotics and weapons trafficker. With the assistance of Thai authorities, the nuclear samples were seized and subsequently transferred to the custody of U.S. law enforcement. A U.S. nuclear forensic laboratory later analyzed the samples and confirmed that the samples contain uranium and weapons-grade plutonium.

Where did he obtain the plutonium from originally? Weapons grade plutonium has never been produced by the private sector, and there are only 6 countries that have ever produced weapons with plutonium:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_with_nuclear_we...

[1] Like trafficking in natural uranium, or modest quantities of tritium.

The press release says that, but the indictment text uses the guarded language "samples contain detectable quantities of..." (page 11). I'd guess the plutonium detection was a trace amount from some banal source, maybe cross-contamination within the lab itself. This gets more plausible when you consider the banality of the samples they supposedly found plutonium in: one was isotopically natural uranium, the other thorium. There's no plausible way to end up with plutonium in those materials other than contamination of some sort.

Yes, but contamination from where? Plutonium does not exist in nature, and plutonium grade is really, really hard to come by.

Thanks for reading more closely. In that case, this is a lot less interesting. It sounds like he was offering materials that are only useful to someone who already has nuclear enrichment/reactor technology.

I think that they're sufficiently inept, they didn't actually know what it was they were selling. What they apparently had, from the Myanmar rebel group, was access to a Myanmar uranium mine (natural uranium); there was a concrete offer of 50 tonnes of ore. What they discussed offering to Iran, repeatedly, was "enriched uranium". It's non-credible that the Myanmar rebels have a secret enrichment program. In at least one text, it's clear they didn't even understand the difference: page 4, "How enriched is it? Above 5 percent?"... "I think so and I hope so".

maybe usefull as dirty bomb?

Either 'The Peacemaker' or 'Sum of all fears' made us believe US is able to identify any plutonium sample back to the reactor where it was created.

But if their claim is real catching the marketing executive is not core issue here … who can produce this …

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