CORRESPONDENCE

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Notes

1. The goal of reducing the costs of post-9/11 security requirements is a major factor driving the large-scale consolidation at DOE's nuclear complex, in which Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico was cleared of potential weapons material this year (including the shutdown of two research reactors), saving tens of millions of dollars a year in security costs.

2. Russia's 1997 physical protection regulations required effectively the same security measures for LEU as for HEU. In a July 2007 conversation with V.P. Struyev, director of the Krylov Shipbuilding Institute, the first Russian facility to eliminate all of its HEU in cooperation with DOE's Material Conversion and Consolidation program, Struyev indicated that for this reason, he expected no security savings as a result of giving up HEU—a situation that gives Russian facilities little incentive to consider changing their reliance on HEU. The new Russian physical protection regulations are more graded, but exactly what savings a facility could realize by eliminating its HEU remains unclear.

3. Alexander Glaser, “Neutron-Use Optimization with Virtual Experiments to Facilitate Research-Reactor Conversion to Low-Enriched Fuel,” in Proceedings of the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management 48th Annual Meeting, July 8–12, 2007, Tucson, Arizona (Northbrook, IL: INMM, 2007).

4. Department of Defense, “Section V: Nuclear Weapons Technology,” in Militarily Critical Technologies List, 1998, <www.fas.org/irp/threat/mctl98-2/p2sec05.pdf>.