Three Chinese citizens have been arrested in Georgia’s capital, Tbilisi, while attempting to illegally purchase 2 kilograms (4.4 pounds) of uranium, the country’s State Security Service said Saturday.
The suspects planned to transport the nuclear material to China through Russia, the security service said in a statement, while also releasing video footage of the detention operation.
“Three Chinese citizens have been detained in Tbilisi while attempting to illegally purchase 2 kilograms of nuclear material — uranium,” the agency said, adding that members of the criminal group planned to pay $400,000 (344,000 euros) for the radioactive material.
According to the authorities, a Chinese citizen already in Georgia, who was in breach of Georgian visa regulations, brought experts to Georgia to search for uranium throughout the country.
Stupid question and not the right place probably, but how do you exactly enrich uranium in order to have the 235 isotope?
Technology
I’m not sure if it’s done differently now, but historically, you’d use a bunch of gas centrifuges in series to separate the isotopes based on molecular weight. Each time you run it through the process, you end up with a higher concentration of the 235 isotope. The heavier 238 isotope then gets repurposed in armor piercing munitions.
Nice try Khamenei
You separate out the isotopes. You don’t create U-235, but rather you extract the fissile isotope from your sample. There’s only a limited amount of the stuff in the world and the majority of uranium still buried (and in fact, the majority of it at all) is non-fissile U-238. Only something like 0.7% of the uranium in the world is U-235.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enriched_uranium