In late 2009 The Boston Globe reported that:

MIT’s 50-year-old nuclear reactor, one of only three US research facilities not run by the Department of Energy that still use material that could also be used to make atomic bombs, will probably not be converted to use a safer fuel for at least another five years because of technical obstacles, according to a recent government report obtained by the Globe.

That means the reactor on the university’s Cambridge campus, originally slated for fuel conversion by 2014, will continue to present a political liability for US officials, who are strongly urging other countries around the world – most notably Iran – to forgo the civilian use of highly enriched uranium to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons.

And MIT responded: Certain basic facts were available to the Globe prior to publication of the article, but did not appear clearly in the article.

One premise of the article was that the MIT Reactor (MITR) could be converted immediately to low-enriched uranium (LEU) fuel if only MIT were willing to accept a small (~10%) decrease in the reactor’s performance. While this statement is true for many low-power university reactors, it is not true for the MITR. Also comments in the article on the security of our fuel inventory are highly misleading