Can the Nuclear Security Summit actually do anything about the urgent danger of plutonium?

Harvard’s Bunn said the absence of top Russian leaders at the event will be noticed, if only because Russia and the United States together control the bulk of the world’s nuclear explosive materials.

Bunn, an expert on physical security, said that the summits have focused too much on short-term fixes rather than on building more robust systems to prevent nuclear terror. In a report, Bunn and his colleagues call for the establishment of a database of nuclear terror-related incidents to demonstrate that the threat is urgent.

Move Over, Uranium, Now It’s Time for Plutonium Can the Nuclear Security Summit actually move beyond stopgap measures and vague promises? FP BY DOUGLAS BIRCH MARCH 21, 2014 proposal by Western countries to limit holdings of a key nuclear explosive, which appears in a draft communique for the Nuclear Security Summit beginning on March 24, is concise and modest.
But its uncertain fate symbolizes the uphill battle Washington faces in moving the biennial summits beyond what critics depict as stopgap measures, small ambitions, and vague promises to tighten security for the world’s stockpile of nuclear explosives.

A January draft of the communique to be released at the March 24-25 summit in the Netherlands — convened at President Obama’s initiative — for the first time includes a suggestion that nations try to restrain their stocks of plutonium, the fuel for the bomb that devastated Nagasaki in August 1945.

“We encourage states to minimize their stocks of HEU [highly-enriched uranium] and to keep their stockpile of separated plutonium to the minimum level, consistent with national requirements,” the draft states.

But that promise, cautious and hedged as it is, has not yet been accepted by the summit participants, according to markings on the draft and interviews with sources familiar with the preparations.

The call to restrict plutonium production — which applies to both military and civilian programs — is a departure and nettlesome to some countries.

Japan, India, and Russia, for example, plan to build new energy systems based on advanced plutonium-burning reactors. France and Great Britain have produced plutonium under contract for other countries. Separately, India, Pakistan, and Israel produce plutonium for weapons, according to a 2013 report by the International Panel on Fissile Materials.

As a result, while the global stocks of weapons-grade uranium have been shrinking after the Cold War, the stocks of plutonium have been growing. They are now estimated at 490 metric tons — enough, in theory, to fuel tens of thousands of weapons………..
Harvard’s Bunn said the absence of top Russian leaders at the event will be noticed, if only because Russia and the United States together control the bulk of the world’s nuclear explosive materials.
Bunn, an expert on physical security, said that the summits have focused too much on short-term fixes rather than on building more robust systems to prevent nuclear terror. In a report, Bunn and his colleagues call for the establishment of a database of nuclear terror-related incidents to demonstrate that the threat is urgent.

This story was published by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit, nonpartisan investigative news organization in Washington, D.C.http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2014/03/21/move_over_uranium_plutonium_nuclear_security_summit