Special nuclear material is a term used by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission of the United States to classify fissile materials. The NRC divides special nuclear material (SNM) into three main categories, according to the risk and potential for its direct use in a clandestine nuclear weapon or for its use in the production of nuclear material for use in a nuclear weapon.
- Strategic SNM (SSNM)
- SNM of moderate strategic significance
- SNM of low strategic significance
Read more about Special Nuclear Material: Category I, Category II, Category III, Uranium-235, See Also, Source
Famous quotes containing the words special, nuclear and/or material:
“Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative; and the definition of it becomes unmeaning and useless in proportion to its abstractness. To define beauty not in the most abstract, but in the most concrete terms possible, not to find a universal formula for it, but the formula which expresses most adequately this or that special manifestation of it, is the aim of the true student of aesthetics.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“The reduction of nuclear arsenals and the removal of the threat of worldwide nuclear destruction is a measure, in my judgment, of the power and strength of a great nation.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience. All the conditions of modern life—its material plenitude, its sheer crowdedness—conjoin to dull our sensory faculties.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)