"Nuclear security is [a] work in progress," International Atomic Energy Agency director Khammar Mrabit said to journalists. "Continuous improvement is a must. Complacency is bad."
Strategies for enhancing international efforts to secure nuclear materials are expected to be a primary focus of the second Nuclear Security Summit scheduled for Monday and Tuesday in Seoul, South Korea. Leaders and top officials from more than 50 nations are slated to take part in the event.
"The agency continues to receive reports ... which show that nuclear and other radioactive materials (are) still not properly secured," Mrabit said, in reference to the agency's Illicit Trafficking Database. "We have roughly around 200 incidents per year."
The director of the IAEA Nuclear Security Office said the number of reported security lapses involving highly enriched uranium are "very low." The majority of incidents reported to the database involve other kinds of radioactive substances, he said.
In the last 10 years, the Vienna, Austria-based agency has provided training to more than 10,000 individuals from across the world on varying aspects of protecting atomic substances. The watchdog has also worked with countries to lock down thousands of radioactive sources, Mrabit said. "Through that we have made it more difficult for people to carry out malicious acts."
Next week's summit seeks to build on the gains of the inaugural 2010 nuclear security meeting in Washington.
"The 2010 summit focused attention and galvanized action to better secure nuclear materials," Arms Control Association researcher Kelsey Davenport said. "It would be a huge missed opportunity [in Seoul] if states do not make significant new commitments and adopt higher nuclear security standards" (Fredrik Dahl, Reuters, March 21).
The United States over nearly three years has assisted five countries -- Chile, Libya, Romania, Serbia and Turkey -- in ridding their territories of weapon-grade uranium, the Associated Press reported.
The AP article did not note the recent announcement by the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration that all highly enriched uranium has been withdrawn from Mexico .
Following President Obama's high-profile Prague speech in April 2009, the United States has assisted roughly 12 nations in withdrawing enough nuclear material to fuel close to 30 weapons, NNSA Deputy Administrator Anne Harrington said. Several heads of state are anticipated to use the platform of the Seoul summit to declare similar successes, she said.
There have been some setbacks in U.S. efforts to lock down international highly enriched uranium supplies. Belarus in August reneged on a bilateral agreement with Washington to surrender a substantial quantity of HEU material in retaliation for international criticisms against President Alexander Lukashenko's government . Harvard University nuclear weapons expert Matthew Bunn said there was the possibility of reaching a new agreement with Minsk at the summit on its stockpile of Soviet-era highly enriched uranium.
An analysis from the Arms Control Association and the Partnership for Global Security determined that roughly four-fifths of the 67 nuclear security pledges offered at the 2010 summit have been met. White House National Security Council point man for nonproliferation Gary Samore said that figure represented a "very good batting average."
At next week's summit, the United States will attempt to secure new pledges, particularly in countering the trafficking of sensitive information and atomic substances, Samore told journalists.
Bunn said some nations might use the summit to announce plans to ratify specific nuclear security-related regimes or to permit IAEA assessments of their procedures for protecting atomic materials. These steps will not close all security gaps, he said.
"It will I believe, be possible to say at the end of four years that for most or all of the highest-risk stocks, some significant progress has been made and the risks have been reduced. What it will not be possible to say at the end of four years is that all the nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material is secured and accounted for," Bunn said (Douglas Birch, Associated Press/Boston Globe, March 22).
European Council President Herman Van Rompuy on Wednesday urged participating nations to make "concrete commitments" in Seoul on nuclear security, the Yonhap News Agency reported.
"Nuclear security can only be ensured if all actors involved, from the governmental to the nuclear operator level, are following the highest possible standards," he said.
Van Rompuy also noted the importance of connecting atomic energy site safety with nuclear materials security. "Following the Fukushima experience, it will also be important to further develop synergies between nuclear safety and nuclear security," he said in writing to Yonhap. "In a longer-term perspective, the system of global nuclear security governance should be further developed. The IAEA should continue to play a central role" (Yonhap News Agency, March 21).
Meanwhile, South Korea on Thursday played down fresh threats from North Korea of consequences if the summit delivers a statement against the regime's nuclear-weapon development, Kyodo News reported.
"The upcoming conference aims at discussing ways to prevent nuclear terrorism, thus nuclear issues related to North Korea and Iran, and North Korea's rocket launch would not be taken up as an agenda," South Korean Foreign Minister Kim Sung-hwan said.
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