  In a fixed-node diffusion Monte Carlo calculation of the total energy of
jellium slabs, Acioli and Ceperley [Phys. Rev. B {\bf 54}, 17199 (1996)]
reported jellium surface energies that at low electron densities were
significantly higher than those predicted in the local-density approximation
(LDA) of density-functional theory. Assuming that the fixed-node error in the
slab and the bulk calculations cancel out, we show that their data yield
surface energies that are considerably closer to the LDA and in reasonable
agreement with those obtained in the random-phase approximation.
