 I'm Tom Wellock, Historian for the NRC. The first civilian-owned research reactor began operation in 1953 at North Carolina State College. The same year Dwight Eisenhower announced his Adams for Peace program. Adams for Peace promoted the construction of research and test reactors in the United States and around the globe. Safe and inexpensive, they fostered research into the secrets of the atom and produced isotopes critical to medicine and industrial uses. The challenge for regulators is to preserve those benefits while ensuring safety, a mission that has evolved with new security threats and shrinking but critical needs for research reactor services. While thousands of times less powerful than nuclear power plants, research reactors posed unique safety issues. They were often used on crowded college campuses. It had to be safe enough for students to operate, perform research, permit public access, and somehow still resist sabotage and theft. One expert said research reactors had to be foolproof, studentproof, and professorproof. The Atomic Energy Commission developed design requirements with large safety margins that tolerated errors. Extensive training and supervision was required of licensed operators. Sabotage was foiled by making the reactor's uranium fuel difficult to remove or destroy reactors such as hardened concrete, steel barriers, and locked access ports. Despite such precautions, weapons proliferation became a persistent concern for government officials. Reactor designers favored fuel highly enriched in fissionable uranium-235. Enriched reactors made for compact, inexpensive, and safe designs that still produced a dense flux of neutrons appropriate for experiments. Uranium-235, however, was also the stuff of atomic bombs. Initially, the AEC only permitted export of reactor technology with low enrichment, but in the 1960s it granted international requests to U.S. manufacturers for high-performance research reactors. The reactors needed only small quantities of enriched fuel, and it was believed that bilateral agreements and regular inspections would assure the used fuel would be returned to the United States. Events in the 1970s demonstrated the limits of this approach. India's 1974 detonation of a nuclear device was made possible with fissionable material taken from a Canadian-supplied research reactor. Given their already small size, most research reactors could be made more resistant to diversion by limiting their inventory of fuel. But lowering the fuel enrichment offered a more permanent solution. In 1978, the Department of Energy launched a program to develop a low-enriched fuel that met the performance needs of research reactors. In the U.S., operators of 20 research reactors whose mission didn't require highly enriched uranium opted to switch to the low-enriched fuel. The NRC supported this effort by developing guidance on fuel qualification and conversion. After the 9-11 attacks, the United States launched the Global Threat Reduction Initiative to accelerate the conversion to low-enriched fuel. 27 reactors around the world, including 6 in the United States, made this conversion, taking out of circulation enough fissionable material to make 20 crude bombs. The NRC also pursued enhancements against sabotage and theft with better staff background screening, access controls, security searches, and coordination with emergency responders. The decline of the nuclear industry since the 1970s and the production of isotopes abroad have reduced the need for research reactors in the U.S. Their numbers have dwindled to about 30. This has increased the vulnerability of the nation's isotope supply for medical uses. The greatest concern is molybdenum-99, called moly-99. Moly-99 decays into the most common radioisotope in nuclear medicine today. Research reactors in the U.S. produced moly-99 until the early 1990s, when economic considerations and technical problems forced an end to their programs. By the beginning of the 21st century, only 5 international reactors produced the vast majority of moly-99. In 2008, the fragility of the moly-99 supply system became evident when a Belgian reactor closed due to radioactive leaks, taking 40% of the world supply with it. A Canadian reactor accounts for much of the U.S. supply, but its government denounced its aging facility would soon close. Most of the remaining reactors producing moly-99 are more than 45 years old. Moly-99 can be produced in some U.S. research reactors, but production has typically used weapons-grade, highly enriched uranium. The Department of Energy has pursued a technical solution by signing cooperative agreements with domestic firms to develop moly-99 from low-enriched fuel. The agreements aim to have operational moly-99 facilities before the Canadian reactor closes. Research reactors were conceived of as simple, inexpensive, safe machines that could produce a multitude of benefits for education, research, and new products. Nuclear proliferation and terrorism, however, have made that simple goal complex. The NRC will need to ensure that research reactors operate safely in a new security environment.