And copper. People stripping contaminated cabling out of old soviet nuclear test sites and selling it as scrap was a major problem in Kazakhstan in the 90's through to the early 2010's. Everything has since been backfilled with concrete, but not before the majority of the cabling entered the supply chain. A long-distance haulier I know found himself surrounded by police with machine guns at Dover, after his truck lit up like a Christmas tree on radiation detectors - he was carrying scrap copper from Romania, which had apparently come from Kaz. That load got stopped, because it went through a radiation detector at a port - but you've got to wonder where the other tens of thousands of tonnes that were lifted ended up over the years.

Here's an article on the cleanup, which mentions the copper theft as an aside:

https://engineering.stanford.edu/magazine/article/one-greate...