On May 27 and 28, the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate Armed Services Committee each approved versions of the defense authorization bill authorizing President Obama's request for a substantial increase in funds to finance the four-year effort to secure nuclear materials worldwide, the goal agreed at the nuclear security summit in April. (See the House bill here, and the Senate bill here.) Appropriators in both House and Senate need to approve the funds before they will become available, and analysts fear Congress may not pass the approprations bills on time, putting these programs on a continuing resolution that would mean more limited funds and slower progress. Analysts from the Fissile Materials Working Group urged appropriators to approve full funding for these programs. Matthew Bunn provided a briefing for Congress outlining the nuclear security issue, the importance of providing adequate funding, and options for Congress to reduce the risk of nuclear terrorism.

On April 15, Russia's last operating plutonium production reactor in Zheleznogorsk was shut down, fulfilling a commitment by President Medvedev at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington D.C.

Plutonium was produced by 13 reactors at three sites in Russia. Ten of these reactors were shut down between 1987 and 1992, and U.S. and Russian officials agreed to replace the remaining three plutonium production reactors with fossil-fuel plants. In recent years, the reactors operated only to provide heat and power to nearby communities. Two reactors at Seversk were shut down in 2008. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the three reactors produced some 1.2 tons of plutonium annually. Zheleznogorsk had become infamous for the high suicide rate amongst the troops guarding the facility.

For more on Russia's plutonium stockpile, see pages 31-43 and 48-49 of Securing the Bomb 2010 and NTI's NIS Nuclear and Missile Database.

Focusing the attention of presidents and prime ministers around the world on securing nuclear materials, the nuclear security summit was a major step toward locking down nuclear stockpiles around the world and keeping them out of terrorist hands. The assembled leaders identified nuclear terrorism as a major threat to global security and endorsed President Obama's goal of securing all vulnerable nuclear material worldwide within four years. Individual countries made important commitments to take steps to improve nuclear security, including:

• Ukraine announced it would eliminate all its highly enriched uranium (HEU) by the end of 2012;
• Canada announced that it would send a large stock of HEU back to the United States;
• Mexico announced that it would convert its research reactor and eliminate the last HEU on its soil;
• All HEU was removed from Chile just before the summit occurred;
• Britain said that it would host an international peer review led by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of nuclear security at its Sellafield site, where over 100 tons of plutonium is stored — by far the most important and sensitive facility where such a review has ever been carried out, and a major step toward making such international reviews a normal part of doing business in the nuclear field, as international safety reviews are;
• France also announced that it would host an IAEA‐led peer review

To follow up on the commitments made, the leaders agreed to hold another summit in South Korea in 2012, and the "sherpas" who help the leaders prepare for the summit plan to meet regularly between now and then.

The key now is to hit the ground running in turning the summit words into real action on the ground in the weeks and months to come. For an assessment of global nuclear security and a set of recommendations to achieve effective security for all nuclear stockpiles in four years, see Securing the Bomb 2010.

For more, see this analysis of the summit; key documents from the summit; a nuclear security summit press conference; and President Obama's post-summit press conference. See also the materials from a major non‐government summit on "Next Generation Nuclear Security" that was held the day before the nuclear security summit.

At the nuclear security summit in Washington in April 2010, Georgian president Mikhail Saakhashvili announced that in March 2010, Georgia security services had once again seized stolen highly enriched uranium (HEU), following up on confirmed seizures in Georgia in 2003 and 2006, to which the new case may be linked. Saakhashvili said that this was the eighth seizure of enriched uranium in Georgia so far. Georgian officials were quick to point to Russia as the source of these stolen materials, a charge Russian officials denied. Journalist Sharon Weinberger details the difficulties facing Georgian efforts to stop nuclear smuggling in Foreign Policy and Nature. The new case makes clear that nuclear theft and smuggling is not a hypothetical concern but an ongoing reality that must be addressed. Journalists Michael Bronner and Lawrence Sheets have provided detailed accounts of the 2006 case (and smuggler Oleg Khintsagov offers a jailhouse confession in the new film Countdown to Zero, which focuses heavily on nuclear terrorism and nuclear smuggling); a very useful analysis of the 2003 and 2006 cases by William Potter and Elena Sokova of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies was presented at a 2007 IAEA workshop on nuclear smuggling.

On 15 September 2009, the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that its Global Threat Reduction Initiative, in cooperation with Hungary's Atomic Energy Research Institute, had converted the highly enriched uranium (HEU)-fueled Budapest Research Reactor (BRR) to low enriched uranium. At the time, of a planned 129 research reactor conversions or shut downs worldwide by 2016, just over 50% had been completed (58 converted and 7 shut down). NNSA has since added another 71 reactors to its scope.

In July, 18 kilograms (40 pounds) of Russian-origin fresh HEU was removed from the BRR site. All Russian-origin HEU (fresh and spent) has been removed from Bulgaria, China, Georgia, Iraq, Latvia, and Romania. Belarus, the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Libya, Poland, Serbia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam still have quantities of Russian-origin HEU on site.

Read NNSA's press release. For more on GTRI and the removal of HEU from high-risk sites, see the assessment on pp. 44-57 and 100-111 and the recommendations on pp. 140-147 of Securing the Bomb 2008 and the web section on Civilian HEU Reduction and Elimination.

On 6 July 2009, Presidents Obama and Medvedev issued a joint statement outlining cooperative efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. While they provided little in the way of specifics, the presidents pledged increased support for existing nuclear security commitments such as: repatriating spent highly enriched uranium (HEU) fuel, converting research reactors (including feasibility studies for Russian reactors) and minimizing the civilian use of HEU; implementing the U.S.-Russia Plutonium Management and Disposition Agreement; "continuously improving" physical protection, accounting, and control of nuclear materials; and helping states around the world carry out their nonproliferation obligations under UN Security Council Resolution 1540. The two presidents also called for expanded nuclear energy cooperation, focused on developing innovative nuclear energy systems; providing reliable nuclear fuel cycle services; and improving the international safeguards system. They agreed to work to bring their bilateral nuclear cooperation ("123") agreement into force, to "provide the basis for these and other types of cooperation." To guide U.S.-Russian cooperation, the two agreed to establish a U.S.-Russian Bilateral Presidential Commission co-chaired by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, with a series of working groups, including a working group on nuclear energy and nuclear security led by Sergei Kirienko, head of Russia's Rosatom state corporation, and U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy Daniel Poneman.

Obama and Medvedev also signed a Joint Understanding to guide START Follow-On Treaty negotiations, committing both sides to reduce their deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,500-1,675, and strategic delivery vehicles to 500-1,100. During the joint press conference, President Obama said that treaty will be completed this year.

Read the nuclear cooperation press release, Joint Understanding fact sheet and the joint press conference. For more on strategies to achieve effective and lasting nuclear security worldwide, see Chapter 5 of Securing the Bomb 2008 and Preventing Nuclear Terrorism: An Agenda for the Next President.

On 30 June 2009, the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced that all of the remaining Russian-origin highly enriched uranium (HEU) in Romania had been removed; all U.S.-origin HEU having been removed by 2008. Slightly less than 54 kilograms of spent and fresh HEU was transported to Russia in two shipments: 23.7 kilograms (52 pounds) of HEU in spent fuel from the Magurele research reactor was flown to the Mayak site; and 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of fresh HEU from the Institute for Nuclear Research in Pitesti was flown to the All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Atomic Reactors (NIIAR) in Dimitrovgrad. NNSA worked in close cooperation with Romania, Russia, and the IAEA to return the material.

In addition to Romania, all Russian-origin HEU has been removed from Georgia, Iraq, Latvia, and Bulgaria. In fiscal year (FY) 2010, GTRI plans to help repatriate 503 kilograms (1,109 pounds) of HEU fuel from Poland, Belarus, Germany, and Serbia to Russia.

Read NNSA's press release. For more on GTRI and the removal of HEU from high-risk sites, see the assessment on pp. 44-57 and 100-111 and the recommendations on pp. 140-147 of Securing the Bomb 2008, and the web section on Civilian HEU Reduction & Elimination.