Since becoming Secretary of Energy, I've strengthened the physical protection of our facilities and beefed up counterintelligence efforts to better identify potential problems, potential targets and potential spies. But security issues cannot halt our cooperation with scientists from other countries, as some have demanded. Protecting our secrets is in our national interest, but so is advancing science. To do so, we need to work beyond our borders. Toward that end, I am announcing today that I will seek legislation to ease restrictions on foreign scientists visiting our national labs.
International cooperation is essential to protect America's security.
Our labs are home to the world's leading experts in the protection of nuclear materials, and their scientific expertise is sometimes needed abroad. In Russia, for instance, they are helping secure hundreds of tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium from theft by rogue states or terrorists. And the success of our science also hinges on international cooperation. Researchers there are probing the origin of the universe, using tomorrow's technology to explore our most distant past. The collider is the collective work of almost one thousand scientists from 19 countries and 90 institutions.