Volume 7, Number 3
April 2010

Editor's Note
Welcome to the April 2010 issue of the INMM Communicator

By Brian Boyer INMM Communicator Editor E-mail: bboyer@lanl.gov

Welcome to the Spring 2010 issue of the INMM Communicator!

I am writing this piece while in Portland at the Pacific Northwest International Conference (PNIC) on Global Nuclear Security–the Decade Ahead. The conference is sponsored by the Pacific Northwest Chapter of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management and the Eastern Washington Section of the American Nuclear Society. I tip my hat to our local section in the Pacific Northwest as they put on a fine conference.

PNIC was organized by PNNL’s Carrie Mathews one of our very active INMM members. She managed to get Richard Rhodes, the Pulitzer Prize winner for the Making of the Atomic Bomb, who opened our conference with a talk titled “Twilight of the Bombs,” which will be the title of his fourth book on the nuclear arms race. The photo below shows Carrie getting Richard Rhodes autographing one of his books for the meeitng organizer. She also got Charles Ferguson the new president of the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) as our dinner speaker. Ferguson was an enthusiastic speaker and great addition to a great program.

This was not the only INMM sponsored conference I attended this year. I was part of the University of Missouri Chapter of INMM sponsored workshop, A Multidisciplinary Workshop to Train the Next Generation Safeguards Advocate, Feb. 9-12, 2010, which also had support and assistance from the U.S. Department of Energy, NA-243, ORNL staff and the INMM Central Chapter. We have a report from this conference from grad student James Cole.

I also attended the International Workshop for Users of Proliferation Assessment Tools -- Workshop I: Users in Regulatory Roles in College Station, Texas. The INMM Standing Committee on Proliferation Assessments and Methodologies organized the workshop and the Texas A&M University Student Chapter of INMM ably hosted the workshop. Support also came from Canberra Albuquerque, the INMM Southwest Chapter, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Sandia National Laboratories. TAMU grad student Adrienne LaFleur has written us a report on this workshop. 

Speaking of students, we have two new student chapters. We welcome the University of Washington in Seattle in the Northwest Chapter and the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque in the Southwest Chapter.

As in every issue of the Communicator, we have news about the Institute’s internal operations in a column by INMM Vice President Scott Vance, Inside Insights. Another regular feature is the piece Member News, by Al Garrett, our Membership Committee chair.