Russian fighting in Georgia putting area’s nuclear materials stocks in jeopardy for theft

When the breakaway region of Abkhazia split from Georgia in 1993, the world's only known case of enriched uranium going missing was reported after up to 2 kilograms of extremely dangerous material was stolen from the region's I. Vekua Institute of Physics and Technology in Sukhumi, which is not safeguarded by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Georgian authorities have previously reported they believe some radioactive materials that had been stored there - including highly enriched uranium - have been sold to terrorists, an assertion the local government in Abkhazia has denied.

There are now fears that the organised criminal gangs that are rife in the region, or even Russian troops themselves, say the Georgians, could exploit the confusion of the current conflict to loot other stocks, officals have told Bellona Web.

Also of security concern and more general environmental worry is Georgia’s unknown quantity of radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs – remotely stationed strontium 90 powered energy stations, which served as navigation beacons.

The Soviet-era nuclear authority Minatom populated remote and coastal areas with these radioactive generators and lost track of thousands of them when the Soviet Union fell.

In the late 90s, Georgian shepherds began turning up with radiation poisoning after warming themselves nears the highly radioactive units, according to Bellona research.

The units are also routinely dismantled for their strontium 90 cores or scrap metal – an eventuality that will likely become reality as the region’s current military crisis with Moscow depends and spreads poverty, Georgian interior ministry and radiation safety authorities told Bellona Web in interviews Monday. ....

US and British security services are worried that terrorist organisations could purchase weapons grade uranium in the bustling black market Region of South Ossetia – an eventuality currently compounded by the tense and deadly struggle between Tblisi and Moscow for predominance in the region - and mix it with a detonator as basic as fertiliser to make a deadly device, British defence officials told the Telegraph.

While an estimated 15 kilograms of uranium is needed to make a nuclear bomb just a small amount is needed for an unconventional device – or dirty bomb, which disperses radioactivity over a limited area by using conventional explosives.

No nuke bombs to come, but terrorist weapons likely

"There is no fear of a nuclear bomb coming out of this region but the bigger danger is that a small amount of uranium combined with conventional explosive terrorists could make a dirty bomb that would make an area the size of a square mile unusable for 30 or 40 years," said a Defence Department source in an interview with Bellona Web and the Telegraph.

"The economic impact would be catastrophic."....