Depleted uranium, where uranium-238 is usually found, can be used to make nuclear “dirty bombs”. The find will renew fears that radioactive material at dozens of poorly-guarded sites around Russia might fall into the hands of terrorist groups.

The United States and other countries have been pressing Russia, which has the world’s second biggest nuclear arsenal, to do more to protect its atomic sites since the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.

One of the few points on which President Bush and his election challenger, Senator John Kerry, agreed in recent television debates was that the possibility of terrorist groups acquiring nuclear material was the biggest threat to the United States.

“This is obviously a worry,” said a Western diplomat. “There is a huge amount of nuclear material just lying around in Russia. Not only is it a threat to local people, but it is potentially a threat to the world at large.” Nuclear officials in Moscow said yesterday that they could not confirm the report.

The Interfax news agency said that a number of homeless people found three stainless steel containers at the dump and took them to a local dealer in scrap non-ferrous metal. The scrap dealer raised the alarm and alerted emergency services in the town.

Atomic energy experts were called in and were quoted by the news agency as saying that one of the containers was used for the transportation of uranium, and the other two for the storage of depleted uranium- 238, which is an extremely dense and highly toxic material mainly used in ammunition and armour.

A spokesman for the Russian Atomic Energy Agency said: “That type of uranium looks very much like lead, so I would not be surprised if someone had simply mistaken it and dumped it at the scrapyard.”

Highly enriched uranium and plutonium — found in spent nuclear fuel — can be used to manufacture a standard nuclear bomb. Spent fuel, as well as other by-products of uranium enrichment such as uranium-238, can also produce a “dirty bomb” that spreads radioactive material through a non-nuclear explosion.

Ecodefense, the independent Russian environmental group, has claimed that more than 16,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel is kept stored in dozens of Soviet-era nuclear facilities in Russia alone. To keep radioactive material safe, the UN atomic agency has suggested building the world’s first global nuclear waste dump in Russia, where it can be stored.

Meanwhile, a truck carrying radioactive materials was seized yesterday at the far eastern port of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the Ria-Novosti news agency reported. Elsewhere, a number of lead containers holding uranium, plutonium and strontium were last week found on a train on its way from Moscow to the southern town of Mineralniye Vody, not far from Chechnya, according to local media reports.

Covering documents mentioned only that the sender was The Ministry of Nuclear Industry and the recipient Ingushetia State University. The radioactive materials were enough to make a“dirty bomb”, specialists from the FSB, the KGB’s successor, were quoted as saying.

A smuggler was last month arrested in Kyrgyzstan after trying to sell weapons-grade plutonium to undercover security officers. The Kyrgyz national, identified by the national security service only by the initial B, kept 60 small lead containers of plutonium-239 in an abandoned sheepfold, state media said at the time. Radiation in the area was several hundred times the legal limit. Russia has consistently denied Western suggestions that the instability of the post-Soviet years had made its nuclear arsenals easy prey. But in May, Moscow and Washington agreed to lock away tonnes of highly enriched uranium (HEU) stored in dozens of poorly guarded research reactors around the world.

Under the plan, Moscow will secure the return of all fresh Russian-origin HEU fuel by the end of 2005 and all spent fuel by 2010 from more than 25 reactors in 17 states.

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