Ebisawa, the government said, conspired to sell uranium and plutonium to a DEA agent posing as an Iranian “general” in charge of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
Asked whether the uranium was enriched above 5% because the Iranian government needed it for nuclear weapons, Ebisawa said: “I think so and hope so.” He later forwarded an email in the name of a mining company offering 50 tons of uranium U3O8 concentrate powder known as “yellowcake” for $6,850,000.
Ebisawa provided photographs of samples, alongside a Geiger counter measuring radiation, and promised the “general’ that the “plutonium” that would be even “better” and more “powerful” for Iran’s use. Prosecutors said the nuclear material came from an unidentified leader of an “ethnic insurgent group” in Myanmar who had been mining uranium in the country.
Samples of the nuclear materials were obtained and a US lab found they contained uranium, thorium and plutonium, and that “the isotope composition of the plutonium” was weapons-grade.
Conspiring to sell yellowcake is deffo naughty. You’ve got to have a licence to do so – I did at one time, never used it – but it’s also very different from selling bomb material. By definition yellopwcake is not enriched. It’s the first stage of getting from uranium ore to uranium. The enrichment stage requires a $10 billion (circa) plant which is something that varied naughties, other than governments, tend not to have.
Containing thorium is irrelevant. Lots of things contain thorium and it’s useless for bombs anyway. Plutonium, well. My guess – and I think I looked at this some years back, this case – is likely to be a milligramme or two. It is possible – not legally perhaps, but possible – to get it as samples. And anything above that size indicates that it came from reactor recycling, it’s just not a naturally occurring element (well, maybe that natural reactor in West Africa did produce it).
Significant – anything more than a handful of grammes – of plutonium is a vast, vast, red flag. Thorium is a nothing and yellowcake is naughty but pretty trivial. You can still get 20 years for trying to deal it without a licence of course.
In terms of actual danger from what this guy was trying to trade – assuming it wasn’t all just a con anyway – the answer is about zero. Still a crime but, you know.
Until a few years back it was easy enough to buy lbs (not tonnes, but lbs at least) of yellowcake in the US. Second hand and retail. It was used as a glaze on pottery up into the 1970s and a number of US high schools had some lying around at the back of a cupboard. No, really. 50lb sacks and so on.
My read on this – note, mine – is that this is deffo a bad guy and, legally, trying to sell yellowcake, yep that’s a crime. But the ability of this guy to contribute anything to a bomb programme is zero.
Yellow cake will naturally contain miniscule amounts of plutonium 239 isotope formed from stray neutron capture by the uranium 238. Whilst the plutonium 239 isotope is the “weapons grade” isotope and you “might” be able to detect the alpha particles emitted as it decays to uranium 235 it’s far simpler to use a mass spectrometer to detect it. Mass spectrometers are wonderfully sensitive things, perfect if you want to detect irrelevantly miniscule amounts of an isotope.
Wonderful things, mass specs – I used to have a couple. Used them mainly for the humdrum business of following rapid changes of %CO2 in gases.
“CO2?” I hear you say. “Does that mean you know about global warming and all that?”
Well, I certainly know more about it than the mythical “97% of scientists” do.
Mmmm, cake!
And somebody talked?
OT update on DEATH:
Canada is set to pass a grim milestone in its medically-assisted suicide program with a total of 100,000 citizens projected to be euthanized by the government before its 10th anniversary on June 17.
The Great White North’s MAID (Medical Assistance in Dying) program will soon cross the sickly six-figure threshold, according to The National Post.
Ottawa’s most recent data shows 15,767 Canadians were euthanized by the state in 2024 — 5.1% of all deaths in the nation that year.
About 45 Canucks per day are being euthanized, according to the report.
In 2021, a total of 9,842 Canadian people were euthanized.
Only 2,000 shelter dogs in Canada were put down that year, according to The Vet Desk.
Tbf tho, anyone who voted for Mark Carney deserves to be put down.
Won’t somebody think of the poor doggies!
Nuts intit?
Imagine explaining to someone from 1996 that in future, Western governments would aggressively replace their own people with Indians, wage open war on your standard of living, and have their own citizens put down like dogs.
The most paranoid fantasies of Neo Nazis were never this grim.
Any Pu from Oklo would have decayed long ago. The fission there stopped around 2 billion years ago.
When I was at school the preparation room behind one of the science labs was used as a darkroom as well, and one of the big jars under the bench contained a uranium salt. It can be used to produce effects on photo prints, supposedly to enhance their artistic merit.
In which case fraud can be added to the charges.
“I hope so, and believe so” …. No, then. Only law enforcement would understand that to mean “yes”.
Inventives matter, I guess.
This is exactly the sort of response you want to get from your black market metals dealer when you’re asking for fissionable material for your atomic bomb.
It’s pretty clear that Ebisawa wasn’t selling anything of value to anyone who wanted to make an atomic bomb. It’s equally clear that governments will always make a very public example of any idiot who tries stuff like this, to remind the serious criminals that this market is strictly off-limits.
But was he a fantasist or just a fraud?
Both I’d guess.