How To Be A Yakuza Nuclear Bomb Trader
Or, alternatively, how not to be
This laddie is going to go away for a long time:
The head of a Japanese crime syndicate conspired to traffic uranium and plutonium in the belief that Iran would use it to make nuclear weapons, US prosecutors have alleged.
Well, OK, I don’t know that he’s going to spend a couple of decades in prison but I’d strongly suspect that he will.
The reason he will is because law enforcement types are really very keen that we don’t end up with a black market in the sorts of things that can be used to make a bomb. A big bang, nuclear, bomb that is. And this is something important to keep in mind. Those forces of law and order are really, really, keen that no such back market really ever develops. So, they do things to make sure it doesn’t. This is an area where “proactive” is one of those good words to use.
The actual press release is here.
“As alleged, the defendant brazenly trafficked material containing uranium and weapons-grade plutonium from Burma to other countries,” said U.S. Attorney Damian Williams for the Southern District of New York. “He did so while believing that the material was going to be used in the development of a nuclear weapons program, and while also negotiating for the purchase of deadly weapons. It is impossible to overstate the seriousness of this conduct. I want to thank the career prosecutors of my office and our law enforcement partners for ensuring that the defendant will now face justice in an American court.”
Hmm, well. Details matter in these things as we’ll come to see.
According to the allegations contained in the indictment, beginning in early 2020, Ebisawa informed UC-1 and a DEA confidential source (CS-1) that Ebisawa had access to a large quantity of nuclear materials that he wanted to sell. Later that year, Ebisawa sent UC-1 a series of photographs depicting rocky substances with Geiger counters measuring radiation, as well as pages of what Ebisawa represented to be lab analyses indicating the presence of thorium and uranium in the depicted substances. In response to Ebisawa’s repeated inquiries, UC-1 agreed, as part of the DEA’s investigation, to help Ebisawa broker the sale of his nuclear materials to UC-1’s associate, who was posing as an Iranian general (the General), for use in a nuclear weapons program. Ebisawa then offered to supply the General with “plutonium” that would be even “better” and more “powerful” than uranium for this purpose.
Selling rock containing uranium and thorium isn’t, really, a crime. For if it were selling a few grammes of Cornwall would be a crime. In fact, selling a bit of pretty much any granite - all those folk making kitchen tops - would be a crime. But how much of exactly what does make a difference.
CC-2 told UC-1 that CC-1 had available more than 2,000 kilograms 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” — and that CC-1 could produce as much as five tons of nuclear materials in Burma.
That is different.
Thorium’s different in that it can’t be used to make a bomb in the first place. Thorium 232 is a lot less scary than it sounds as 232 is the isotope that makes up 99% and more of any naturally occurring Th. So, you could - and if you wanted to, would - describe just some regular Th as being 232.
The only military use (that I know of at least) might be in the sort of reactors you put into submarines. And anyone who is making nuclear submarines doesn’t need a yakuza to find the fuel for them.
It’s also true that Th - whether 232 described or not - is a waste product from many types of mining. A rare earth concentrate production plant might well spit some out. So might a tin processing plant. In fact, the reason that Lynas put its rare earth processing plant in Malaysia is that the place had already been used for tin processing and so was already Th contaminated. I certainly wouldn’t find it difficult to believe that there are Burmese tin processors (the same sort of alluvial, ie river bottom, ore as Malaysia) that have a stock of thorium they’d like to get rid of.
Their problem is that there’s not much of a market. Some years back I shipped a 13lb piece to a customer in the US. As far as I’m aware, and the trade statistics seem to bear this out (yes, I’m enough of a nerd that I did check those to see whether annual shipments changed in that year I did it), that was the only thorium transaction in the US that year. Thorium is, other than for those nuclear subs - and the v occasional 13lb piece - a pollutant, not an asset.
Thorium’s also not very dangerous. Sure, you’d not want to snort it (looks a lot like cocaine, the oxide does) but that’s much more about heavy metal poisoning than it is radioactivity even if you’d still not want to snort it for the radioactivity alone. But, largely, and by and by, it’s a pollutant to get rid of. And it’s certainly not a useful part of a nuclear bomb program. The price reflects this - until very recently that price had been negative for some decades.
U3O8, yellowcake, that’s different though. There’s a whole international regulatory regime around that.
Again, it’s not very dangerous, but it is controlled. Uranium mine output is usually in this form. Current pricing is of the $50 a lb level (it’s not $5 and it’s not $500 at least). There's an international market in it, for this is where nuclear fuel comes from - and, yes bomb making material. But who is allowed to deal in it is restricted. I’ve had a uranium licence so obviously it’s not controlled all that tightly - imagine, an international bureaucracy seriously worried about something isn’t going to allow me to have a licence now, are they? But it is controlled. And trading it without a licence is one of those things that sensible people don’t do.
So much so that people who want to speculate in the uranium price can’t, in fact, do so directly. Because it’s not possible to get one of those trading licences which allows you to own and speculate. Or it is, but those licences are handed out to people like me, not you. So much so that there are investment funds - like the company Yellow Cake - which do all that hard work. They operate, really, like an ETF which owns uranium. So you can speculate in the price without yourself having to have a licence.
Yellow cake is controlled, yes bad things will happen to those who trade it without the requisite licences. That there’s material floating around isn’t, in fact, all that much of a problem. Because the next stage is an enrichment plant. Those cost $billions at least and at the top end $10s of billions. Really, it’s only a state actor who has one of those. And to build bombs - reactors can use the cheap sort - you need to have the expensive sort of enrichment plant.
This is actually what all the Iran and nuclear thing is about. Iran has signed the international atomic energy treaty (whatever it’s called, can’t be bothered to look it up) and that really says two things.
We’ll not build a bomb
2. Everyone has to allow us the technology to build a nuclear industry and reactors and fuel’n’stuff.
So, when Iran said it wanted to build reactors that’s fine. And an enrichment plant to fuel the reactors that’s also fine. But then they decide to build a top end plant that can make bombs, which they don’t need. Which is why everyone has been offering them reactor designs, fuel and fuel reprocessing, but not a fuel reprocessing plant, because, you know, “Hey Guys! No bombs, right?” The nuclear sanctions stem from not really believing the no bombs part when they build a high end enrichment plant.
But now think a little more. You’re a state actor, you control a whole country, you’ve spent $10 billion on your top end reprocessing plant. You’re going to the Yakuza to fuel your program now, are you? No, you’re not, you’re going to go to some nicely radioactive piece of the country you already control and extract the uranium from there. It is, after all, a pretty common material. Cornwall is perhaps 100 parts per million uranium. That’s the whole county, which is more than enough to be getting along with.
So, yes, selling yellow cake, naughty, but not a globe worrying event simply because it’s so damn hard to get from that oxide concentrate up to a bomb. And anyone who can do the yellowcake to bomb thing doesn’t, not really, have to buy the yellowcake on the black market.
Which brings us to this last claim:
Inside the room, CC-2 showed UC-1 two plastic containers, each holding a powdery yellow substance (the Nuclear Samples), which CC-2 described as “yellowcake.” CC-2 advised that one container held a sample of uranium in the compound U3O8, and the other container held Thorium-232. UC-1 photographed and video-recorded the Nuclear Samples,……With the assistance of Thai authorities, the Nuclear Samples were seized and subsequently transferred to the custody of U.S. law enforcement authorities. A U.S. nuclear forensic laboratory examined the Nuclear Samples and determined that both samples contain detectable quantities of uranium, thorium and plutonium. In particular, the 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.
And, well. Plutonium is normally thought of as a product of uranium that’s been through a reactor. And that is generally true. But there have been natural reactors of size, deposits so pure that they spontaneously fissioned. It could be true that little bits of deposits do this often enough. So the plutonium could be just a natural part of that yellowcake.
Another option is scarier - that a fuel reprocessing plant is leaking material into the black market. That’s something we definitely wouldn’t want happening.
The third and final option is that there’s a couple of micrograms, maybe milligrammes of plutonium out there. Well, in fact, there is. But it’s micro and milli grammes, not the tens of kg needed for a bomb. There also aren’t enough of these lab samples to make up a bomb. But they float around the black market because some folk think they’re worth a lot.
But now the biggie. There is, to any useful level of accuracy, no black market in these bomb materials. Anyone really trying to develop a bomb is a state actor and can build their own equipment. There’s not enough - barring a recycling plant leaking - out there to build a bomb with anyway if you’ve not got one of those two, either a separation or a recycling plant.
So, what’s happening here? The actual buyers are those law enforcement types picking up those who don’t understand the above.
By analogy, a quarter century back I had a nice little business in a Russian - OK, Soviet - nuclear alloy. The stuff used to make reactors and processing plants, not the stuff that goes pop itself. It came in tubes, 10 metres long (seamless too!). And the price was about $80 a kg for those tubes. I’d happily buy at $4 and $5 a kg. Because I wanted it as scrap, just metal units to feed into the aluminium business. And there was scrap around, offcuts (what in the trade is referred to as “process scrap” or “manufacturing scrap”) and I could buy them, ship them to the aluminium plant and we were all happy.
At the time there were a few in Russia who would offer to sell the tubes, new and unused, for that $80. No use to me, 10x over what I could sell them for. A couple of times there were people outside Russia offering those tubes. I made a couple of light bids - my $4 - and never really did get any meaningful replies. Ho Hum.
Then I spotted that certain laddies had been picked up by folks with letters and numbers after their job descriptions and all became clear. The offers were a honey trap to catch those who thought they could sell the tubes to someone who would use them naughtily. No one ever came after me for buying at scrap prices - my assumption is that the authorities were happy to see the scrap vanishing into aluminium where it certainly could never be used as tubes ever again.
The point is that the honey trap does exist. And for the “black market” in nuclear metals and bomb making materials - as nuclear and bomb making materials that is, not as scrap into other industries - the only market that really does exist is the honey trap one.
It’s not that someone trying to sell you a bomb is dodgy, it’s that someone trying to buy one from you started their career eating donuts on an all night watchout.
So the advice is, if you’re looking for a career as a Yakuza nuclear bomb trader, then don’t. The career opportunity simply doesn’t exist.
By the way, if you’ve got some of those 10 metre zirconium/niobium tubes, seamless, then I’m interested. 1.1% Nb, 2.5% Nb, no matter. Even just the offcuts and scrap actually. Starting bid might be about $4 a kg. But if it is the tubes, neatly packed, unused, then could you make sure you drive a tank over them first? I really do want them only for the scrap value, that’s the only valuation that keeps us all out of jail.