Smuggling of nuclear material: Georgia prevents the sale of a nuclear bottle
Georgia counterterrorism police arrested a man carrying uranium in a tiny glass bottle. Ilia Belkania, a 52-year-old who lives on social benefits, planned to sell the small consignment of nuclear material for $2 million, the State Security Service said on May 1.
State security officials have released a video showing a small bottle of bright yellow-green substance being checked with a radiation detector. The video also shows officers in balaclavas arresting Belkania in an unspecified wooded location and retrieving his vial. The seized material "contains the radioactive substance uranium and belongs to the category of nuclear materials," said Davit Kutateladze , spokesman for the State Security Service.
The unemployed Belkania lived in a rural house in the western region of Samegrelo and was arrested near the Black Sea port city of Poti. His elderly parents told the media that police raided their home shortly after the arrest. "I don't think my boyfriend could have done such a thing," Belkania's mother told reporters.
Officials have not elaborated on where the uranium comes from or its potential buyers, but the nation has long been in the throes of smuggling radioactive materials. Three men were arrested last year for storing unspecified radioactive substances in two different locations. The previous year, police had stopped an attempt to sell americium 241, a radioactive isotope, for €300,000.
Georgia uncovered a number of cases of radioactive smuggling in 2015 and 2016, including two attempts to sell uranium and an attempt to dump caesium-137, a byproduct of nuclear fission. In none of these cases were the sources of the radioactive materials made public. The region's only nuclear power plant, an old Soviet-era facility, operates in neighboring Armenia.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, branches of Soviet research institutes were closed in Georgia and the nation was littered with ownerless radioactive waste. This offered a rich breeding ground for smugglers. At the time, throughout the post-Soviet space “potatoes were better guarded” than nuclear fuel, to quote a Russian military prosecutor.
With US funding, Georgia recovered hundreds of radioactive materials from abandoned research facilities in the 1990s. At the end of the decade, the United States removed Soviet-sourced uranium fuel from a research reactor at Mtskheta, just outside the capital Tbilisi. The U.S. Department of Defense has equipped major transportation hubs in Georgia with radioactive detection equipment and has provided training to police forces.
However, Georgia's borders remained porous for smugglers, partly due to the volatile situation around the borders of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Smuggling continued until 2010, with small street vendors carrying pieces of materials expensive and dangerous in whatever package they could find at hand. For the most part, the substances transported were small in terms of quantity but enormous in terms of potential consequences. In 2006, a Russian smuggler was famously arrested for transporting 100 grams of bomb-grade uranium in a sandwich bag.
Thanks to international, mostly American, help, Georgia's defenses against smuggling nuclear materials have improved significantly, but cases of smuggling continue to suggest that the nation is still part of the atomic smuggling business.
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The article Smuggling of Nuclear Material: Georgia Prevents the Sale of a Nuclear Bottle comes from Scenarios Economics .
This is a machine translation of a post published on Scenari Economici at the URL https://scenarieconomici.it/contrabbando-di-materiale-nucleare-la-georgia-previene-la-vendita-di-una-bottiglia-nucleare/ on Sat, 06 May 2023 07:00:33 +0000.