Those Burmese Nuclear Metals

Hmm. Perhaps not quite so much.

A member of the Japanese criminal underworld has pleaded guilty to handling nuclear material sourced from Myanmar and seeking to sell it to fund an illicit arms deal, US authorities have said.

Yakuza leader Takeshi Ebisawa and a co-defendant had previously been charged in April 2022 with drug trafficking and firearms offences, and both were remanded.

He was then additionally charged in February 2024 with conspiring to sell weapons-grade nuclear material

And, erm. Rilly?

During a sting operation including undercover agents, Thai authorities assisted US investigators in seizing two powdery yellow substances that the defendant described as “yellowcake.”

“The (US) laboratory determined that the isotope composition of the plutonium found in the Nuclear Samples is weapons-grade, meaning that the plutonium, if produced in sufficient quantities, would be suitable for use in a nuclear weapon,” the Justice Department said in its statement at the time.

One of Ebisawa’s co-conspirators claimed they “had available more than 2,000 kilograms (4,400 pounds) of Thorium-232 and more than 100 kilograms of uranium in the compound U3O8 – referring to a compound of uranium commonly found in the uranium concentrate powder known as ’yellowcake’.”

The thorium. Well, it doesn’t go bang. Also, 99.98% of naturally occuring Th is this isotope. So, it’s probably just Th itself. And that could be – could, obvs – just a byproduct of Burma’s rare earths industry. Th is a normal byproduct of a rare earths industry.

Yellow cake is just the standard uranium oxide. Not enriched or anything.

Now it is naughty to trade those across borders. Within not so much but across, yes. You should have licences and so on. But while they’re indeed nuclear they’re not really nuclear. I’ve, wholly legally, bought and sold a bar of thorium, for example.

The weapons-grade plutonium, that’s a different thing. But my very strong suspicion is that this is a gramme or two – if even that. There are odd bits of lab samples that sometimes float around out there. But not the some kgs that would be necessary to actually do anything other than a dirty bomb. And to produce more in any quantity requires both a reactor and also a reprocessing plant. That second is the real limit – they’re rare things.

As to the value of this to anyone trying to build a bomb. To build an actual Bang! the value is zero. No one actually trying to build a Bang! would have the slightest interest in this material at any price at all.

To someone who would like to mix some gunpowder with something “nucular” to scare people, yes, it’s got value. But it’s also not rare material in the slightest so that value’s pretty low.

The truth being that near all (and it’s the “near” which is the dangerous bit) of this illegal market in nuclear weapons materials is the dimmer crooks selling it to undercover agents. Anyone who really wants to build a Bomb! isn’t interested in this shit in the slightest.