Why this matters:

The Department of Energy cannot adequately protect America ’s voluminous stockpile of weapons grade nuclear material, which is housed at 13 locations throughout the country. In the post-9/11 era, we know that suicidal terrorists are capable of massive attacks – the worst possible scenario would be terrorists penetrating a nuclear facility and building an improvised nuclear bomb, which could have a similar force of the Hiroshima blast. A major step to securing America ’s nuclear material is consolidating it into fewer and more secure locations. Not only will this help solve the security challenge, it will also save the U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars in security costs. POGO makes recommendations that will reduce the number of sites containing these nuclear materials from 13 down to seven.