Customs in the southern Russian city of Orenburg have seized a container with 37 kilograms of depleted uranium heading to Kazakhstan
Published:
30 January 2005 y., Sunday
Customs in the southern Russian city of Orenburg have seized a container with 37 kilograms of depleted uranium heading to Kazakhstan, the RIA-Novosti news agency reported on Friday.
The agency cited the chief customs inspector in charge of media relations, Maksim Prytkov, as saying that the container had been detected by a special radioactivity sensor installed at the customs post. The car was searched and the metal container with 37 kilograms of uranium-238 was found.
Curiously, the container was mentioned in the customs declaration as a sports weight. The owner said he had found it in a dump and used it as a training weight for some time. A criminal case has been instigated.
Uranium-238 cannot be used to produce nuclear weapons, but it is a radioactive and highly toxic substance that can be used to make a so-called “dirty bomb” and also can be enriched to produce weapons-grade plutonium-239.
Šaltinis:
mosnews.com
Copying, publishing, announcing any information from the News.lt portal without written permission of News.lt editorial office is prohibited.
The most popular articles
Pablo Picasso's 'Jeune Fille Endormie' is one of the artist's most celebrated paintings. This summer, the portrait of Picasso's lover, Marie-Thérèse, will go under the hammer at Christie's auction house in London.
more »
The poor, West African country of Togo is not the first place that springs to mind when considering the science of robotics, but one aspiring scientist is on a mission to change public perception.
more »
Fifty-four of the world's best baristas descended on Bogota, Colombia for the 12th annual World Barista Championship.
more »
Fifty-four of the world's best baristas descended on Bogota, Colombia for the 12th annual World Barista Championship.
more »
Operators at the radioactive Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant say they are unable to rescue stray pets wandering the grounds.
more »
Using high speed x-ray video, scientists at Harvard University have shown that dogs - like cats - use an innate knowledge of physics to drink.
more »
She's only four years old and not even in school, yet Aelita Andre has just opened her very own art exhibition in New York City.
more »
A 17-year-old high school student from southern China sells one of his kidneys to buy an iPad and iPhone.
more »
The students at the University of Pennsylvania have been working on a robot, named, Graspy.
more »
An australian micro-brewery has joined forces with a space engineering firm to produce the first beer for consumption in space.
more »