At a nonproliferation summit on Monday in Washington, Obama will encourage leaders from 47 countries to work with the US to secure and remove HEU from reactors, as Chile finally did last month.
“We are happy to see it go,” Fernando Lopez of the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission told The Associated Press, which exclusively witnessed the secret transfer of the material from reactors near Santiago to the United States.
“Countries normally don’t want to be loaded with waste from other countries,” Lopez acknowledged. “To put it in a safe place is valuable for everybody.”
The new US strategy considers a nuclear attack by terrorists or the spread of nuclear weapons technology to rogue nations to be greater threats than the Cold War fear of a communist enemy initiating a nuclear Armageddon.
