Introduction

This meeting has come at a very auspicious time because although we are fairly well set up in the area of review of safety aspects of licensing, and Steve Ramos will become the contact of all such correspondence and communication in the future relating to this program. There is a real confusion, I'll admit, in the field of safeguards and physical security because of the requirement to continually upgrade this area of our licensing activity to stay abreast of what the Commission perceives to be the need due to a threat of whatever name you want to give to it. For instance, right now among these 70 research reactors, we have some that are doing everything they can to reduce their inventory so that they can get out from under some of our old and new requirements, while we have the anomaly that since General Atomic is about to go out of the business of making FLIP fuel, we have some licensees who want to increase their inventory. However, we have about eight different types of research reactors in here. From higher levels of the GE test reactor (50 MW) to those on down to a fraction of a watt, they have different types of fuel elements, they have different types of enrichment. We have relicensed 21 reactors that use highly enriched uranium which to use right now means anything above 20%. These are the ones who will be affected by this program unless some of the other 50 or so desire in the future to change their way of doing business