Volume 3, Number 2
September 2005

Inside Insight

By Nancy Jo Nicholas INMM Vice President E-mail: njnicholas@lanl.gov

After an extremely successful INMM Annual Meeting, I am pleased to write this column to provide our members with insight on the activities of the INMM leadership. This is my opportunity to share with you what the INMM Executive Committee has been working on for you.

By the way, when I refer to the INMM Executive Committee, I mean the four officers (president, vice president, secretary and treasurer) plus the immediate past president and four members-at-large. In addition, the chair (or a designate) of each INMM chapter chartered outside the United States and having fifty or more members (right now that’s the Japan Chapter and the Vienna Chapter) is an ex officio member of the Executive Committee.

On July 9, immediately before the Annual Meeting, the INMM Executive Committee met at the JW Marriott Desert Ridge in Phoenix. As usual, many INMM technical division chairs, committee chairs and chapter presidents also participated.

We discussed a number of issues including topical workshops, participation in technical standards committees, student activities, communication strategies and future annual meetings and plenary speakers. The Executive Committee will meet again in November to discuss and approve the institute’s operating budget for fiscal year 2006.

The INMM leadership is also engaged in several timely nuclear materials management initiatives. I’d like to highlight some of the areas of greatest activity.

• An ad hoc committee lead by Steve Mladineo, chair of the INMM Nonproliferation and Arms Control Technical Division, is developing a working definition for “proliferation resistance.”
  
• A subcommittee of the INMM Fellows Committee is evaluating options for responding to the challenge Charles Curtis presented in his opening plenary talk at the annual meeting regarding sharing best practices. (Download a PDF of Curtis’ opening plenary speech.) INMM is working with Curtis’s Nuclear Threat Initiative to organize a second international workshop on materials control and accounting and physical protection best practices.
  
• The Student Activity Committee is actively encouraging student involvement in the INMM in an effort to help mentor the next generation of nuclear materials experts worldwide.
  
• An ad hoc group of INMM members lead by Galya Balatsky is exchanging ideas about addressing the illicit trafficking of nuclear materials and related nuclear security issues.

We’re about to start the membership renewal process, so I encourage you to use the online registration option to pay your 2006 membership dues and verify your membership information.