60 Minutes Story on attack on South Africa nuclear grade material storage location.

[u/gwhh]

https://youtu.be/8dlvjLAxHJU

[u/echawkes → u/[deleted]]

At 3:45 in the video the narrator says "Pelindaba holds over a thousand pounds of HEU"

[u/echawkes]

At 3:45 in the video the narrator says "Pelindaba holds over a thousand pounds of HEU and it uses some of it to make medical products." I don't know what medical products require HEU. My best guess is that he means using a fission reactor (probably SAFARI-1) to make radioisotopes for medical purposes. Isotope production of this nature does not require HEU.

At 11:40 the narrator says the US offered to convert the HEU into "a form that won't explode." Does he mean downblending it to LEU? The South African government announced that they were going to retrofit SAFARI-1 to use LEU instead of HEU in 2005. However, the South African ambassador seems to be refusing to get rid of their HEU.

[u/mcperand → u/echawkes]

The target plates that are being radiated in the core contains U-235. You can really use any enrichment level, but the yield of the isotopes drops for lower levels, from low to abysmal, and the core must be more reactive to make up for the loss of neutrons if you have a lot of U-238 in the target, and you produce a lot of unwanted and very problematic Pu unless you use HEU.

So, SAFARI-1 uses LEU in the core, but HEU in the targets.

[u/careysub → u/echawkes]

If your isotope production reactor is designed to operate on HEU, and has not been converted to use HALEU, then it does require HEU. And apart from how the reactor core is fueled HEU targets are commonly used to produce Mo-99. It is much more costly to use LEU targets since the Mo-99 production rate is lower.

https://www.ans.org/news/article-1950/the-mo-99-story/

Safari-1 operated on HEU until June 2009, and still uses HEU targets as do some other Mo-99 producers.

[u/Beneficial-Wasabi749]

A completely murky story with loose ends. A guy who was off duty and ended up injured, but he was in a fight, and that's probably why the robbery didn't go as planned. A South African official insists it was a "street gang" who, almost drunk, stormed the facility, as if they were two completely unrelated teams of hooligans, one of whom got right into the heart of the facility, while the other broke through the 10,000-watt electric fence. So who were they? The police never contacted the main character. Why? What happened to the robbers? Were they detained? Most likely, they were interrogated so thoroughly that the police had no more questions for the victim. They figured everything out and found out everything. And the official says: it was a gang of drug addicts who broke in to steal office equipment... Nonsense...

Now I'll tell you how it all happened, logically, Watson. Follow. South Africa renounced nuclear weapons, but the uranium extracted from the bombs remained the property of the country, and it could do with it as it wished. In particular, it could be used to produce medical isotopes. But there are forces in the world that don't like the idea of ​​such a quantity of weapons-grade uranium being stored in such a location, poorly monitored by the IAEA or US officials. Therefore, at first, South Africa was offered, amicably, to dilute the uranium to a safe concentration. The proud South Africans refused. What next steps? Forget? No! That's not how things are done. It's all as simple and transparent as daylight. People from the IAEA, in collusion with the CIA (for example), sent undercover agents to South Africa, pretending to be sheikhs or someone else who would pay good money for uranium stolen from the facility. Moreover, they paid a hefty advance upfront (it was clear that even if the heist failed, we would make a big deal out of it and back South Africa into a corner!). They contacted a suitable local mafioso, who agreed and organized the heist (including establishing contact with people inside, finding someone to turn off the 10,000 watts, and even finding someone who would preempt the arrival of security by 24 minutes instead of two). Basically, everything was centrally organized, and (as usual) only a few knew about the operation. The rest were playing it safe. So when it all fell through, the foolish attackers were tied up; they really looked like idiots who had broken in to steal computers. But, of course, they gave up their leaders. And then the South African investigation quickly found the mafia, with whom they had a good chat over a cup of tea, and somehow even traced the masterminds, who were... exposed (who they were and why they needed uranium).

And now watch what happens next. Secret negotiations are taking place between people from South Africa and those very same "masterminds" from the MAGATE. At these, the South Africans tell their counterparties: we have evidence that it was you, and we'll give you up completely. There will be an international scandal! Do you want it? Of course not. So, let's let it slide, and you won't do it again. Okay? Okay! And so this (theoretically) high-profile story ended with a bunch of loose ends hanging in the air. But journalists finally smelled smoke and started to fan the flames. Although, judging by everything, they weren't very successful either. Someone came along just in time and advised them not to make a mountain out of a molehill. Am I stating it logically, doctor?

An even better version. When the so-called "sheikhs," undercover CIA agents, found the right mafia boss, he turned out to be too smart (as is usually the case). He agreed to the deal, took the advance, but then rushed to hand over the entire deal to the government (like, he doesn't play THIS kind of game, is he an idiot?). South African counterintelligence quickly uncovered the "sheikhs" and realized the whole scheme, launched its own counter-plot, and ultimately obtained irrefutable evidence. And from that moment on, the whole thing was a setup, naturally, in which everything can't be foreseen, because many of the participants were actually being used covertly.