Russia, denying security is lax at its nuclear facilities, says it has arrested three men for trying to sell radioactive material to foreigners.
St. Petersburg police spokesman Igor Komissarov on Thursday said the men, arrested Aug. 12 in Kaliningrad, sought $1 million for a 130-pound container of an unspecified radioactive material.
The news comes amid rising concern that nuclear material from Russia is leaking onto the international black market. Germany has seized four packages of weapons-grade plutonium-239 and enriched uranium in four months and says tests confirm it's from Russian facilities.
Several former Soviet states have vast stockpiles of plutonium and other nuclear-bomb ingredients. The material can be worth millions to smugglers who can spirit it out of storage yards or nuclear facilities.
Experts take small comfort from analysis of the German seizures, which suggests Russian research facilities, rather than big stockpiles of weapons-grade plutonium, are the source.
William Potter, of the Monterey (Calif.) Institute, says Russia's security system is so lax, they don't know what's in their inventory. "At least tons, if not tens of tons of material are not accounted for," he says.
