Russian engineers are being arrested who were producing Bitcoin.

Russian authorities have arrested engineers in one of the country's most hidden nuclear poisons, after allegedly attempting to make “bitcoin mining” into their supercomputers.

Several employees have been arrested at the Federal Nuclear Centre in Sarov, western Russia, after making “attempts to use the work equipment for personal purposes, including the so-called mine”, said a spokesperson for the Centre for Interfact News Agency.

Their “targets were shut down in time”, they added.

The Federal Nuclear Center is monitored by Rosatom, the Russian nuclear agency. In 2011 the center launched its new supercomputer with a capacity of 1 pethoplop, which can perform a thousand trillion operations per second.

The computer was not intended to connect on the internet, and when scientists tried to do so, the centre's security department was alarmed. Kriptomoneds like Bitcoin do not rely on decentralised computer servers.

This allows people to provide computer processing energy to enable transactions to be carried out. In return, people are rewarded with bitumen.