Russian nuclear scientists arrested for using supercomputers to mine cryptocurrency

Russian security officers have arrested several scientists working at a top-secret Russian nuclear warhead facility for allegedly mining crypto-currencies.



The scientists had tried to use one of Russia's most powerful supercomputers to mine Bitcoins, media reports say.



The Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov, Western Russia, is a tightly guarded no-man's-land and was not even marked on Soviet maps.



The centre's press service said: "There has been an unsanctioned attempt to use computer facilities for private purposes including so-called mining."



The Federal Nuclear Centre's supercomputer boasts a capacity of 1 petaflop, the equivalent of 1,000 trillion calculations per second.