Opening a dusty wooden box he pulled from a shelf, he revealed an array of thin aluminum-coated plates, and lifted one out with his bare hands. "This is it," said Hugo Torres, the reactor's operations manager. "It" is highly enriched uranium 235, HEU for short. It's the material that most worries anti-terrorism experts. Just 25 kilograms (55 pounds) of it in a nuclear bomb could devastate an entire city, in the same way the United States destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II.
....
"For the first time, preventing nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism is now at the top of America's nuclear agenda," Obama said before signing a new START treaty with Russia to sharply reduce the number of warheads each country has ready to fire. Obama now hopes to enlist leaders of 47 other nations at a White House summit beginning Monday to help him keep an ambitious promise, made a year ago this week, to secure all the world's vulnerable nuclear material within four years.
...
Chile was among the first to agree to surrender its last HEU, 18 kilograms (40 pounds) it got from Britain and France for its two research reactors. A team of Americans finally shipped it out last month just after the country's massive earthquake, weaving a convoy of trucks around shattered highways in the middle of the night to reach a functioning port.
...
The U.S. has already recovered 91 percent of the 1,362 kilograms (3002 pounds) of U.S.-origin HEU from reactors around the world, bringing it for safekeeping and reprocessing to the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and the Y-12 National Security Complex, the government's fortress-like HEU repository in Oak Ridge, Tenn. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. also has provided the equipment and expertise to bring back to Russia more than 53 percent of the 2,351 kilograms (5,183 pounds) of HEU the Soviet Union sent to other countries. But 680 kilograms (1,500 pounds) of potentially weapons-usable HEU supplied by countries other than the U.S. and Russia is still out there, and vulnerable.
4 pages worth at the link. A good read. Some big kudos for Obama on pushing to get this material back via dimplomatic methods. In exchange for the weapons grade HEU the US helped convert Chile two medical isotope reactors to use safer LEU (low-enriched uranium). 18 kg down... 680 kg to go.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/11/AR2010041101903.html
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