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NEWSLETTER  Nº 2 of 2005

Following the successful experiment of March 2004, the Executive Committee held its first meeting this year on 9 June 2005 by telephone. It proved a little less easy this time to get everyone together, but as Dave Rossin was able to join the group it proved possible to bring one matter outstanding from the November committee meeting to a satisfactory conclusion. I joined Neville Chamberlain in Marlow and most of the others rang in from San Diego where they had been attending a successful meeting of the American Nuclear Society, or from Rio de Janeiro.

The formalities were quickly over. The main substantive subject of discussion was how to resolve the internal objections which had been raised over the "executive statement" on hazardous radiotoxic waste, written by Neville Chamberlain with the assistance of Dan Meneley, which the Executive Committee had authorized last year. It had become clear from extensive exchanges since the last meeting of the committee that it was unlikely that any compromise redraft would satisfy either side.

This was confirmed in discussion at the meeting. The Chairman therefore proposed that the paper should be reclassified as a "member’s viewpoint" instead of an "executive statement", and a new page on the website could be established for it and others similar. In this way it would open to those who held different views on a topic to express them by submitting their alternative views to the Executive Committee for posting on the new "members’ viewpoints" page. This suggestion proved acceptable to all sides, and the matter was thus amicably resolved. In addition Bertrand Barre agreed to a request from the Chairman that he should mastermind the preparation of a review paper on current policy and practice in all nuclear countries on the storage of HLW.

At the Washington meeting the then chairman put forward the outline of a proposed paper on low level radiation, in the hope that the LLR group might commission contributions to it. In practice this has not happened. Neville Chamberlain is willing to co-ordinate and edit contributions, but the committee agreed with him that it was desirable that the different theories should be covered authoritatively by experts in these areas. I shall be in touch with appropriate persons about this in due course.

Following the November meeting the Executive Statement on nuclear installations and terrorism was forwarded to the INSC with a request that their constituent bodies should publicise it as appropriate. I shall be writing to the new chairman of the INSC shortly to see if there has been any feedback.

A number of new papers were proposed and approved in principle at the November meeting in Washington. In most cases individuals present at that meeting volunteered to take the lead in drafting or establishing a drafting group (as summarised in Newsletter no 1 just circulated). However to date there has been no sign of any progress on any of these drafts. I shall be writing to those concerned to see when drafts might be forthcoming, in the hope that we may have something to report to the AGM in September or to the next meeting of the Executive Committee in December.

Following the last meeting of the Executive Committee I wrote to all those members from whom nothing had been heard for eighteen months to inform them of the Executive’s decision that they should be reclassified as Emeritus Members. Several replied agreeing to this. One wanted to remain active. The others as before said nothing and their reclassification therefore took place at the beginning of this year. This means that there are now a significant number of vacancies to be filled. Please let the Chairman or me know if you have good candidates to propose. The procedure is that the Executive Committee (or the AGM) will review any nominations, and submit those that are approved to a postal (i.e. Email) ballot of the whole membership for endorsement. Please attach a short CV to all nominations (this should be really short as usual to forward it to all the electing members).

The IAEA has now agreed to a collaborative project with the Nuclear Energy Academy on the preservation of nuclear knowledge. The Executive Committee approved a short outline draft of the project, which will be sent to Mr Yanev who is the Agency’s project manager in this area. Once we have the Agency’s input I shall be approaching you all further for contributions to the substance of the project

The Executive Committee welcomed the news that the WNU had successfully launched its summer seminar (due to open on 9 July) at Idaho Falls. Thanks to the support of the United States DOE the chicken-and-egg deadlock which had so far prevented any real substance being given to the outline plans to establish a World Nuclear University worked out at its launch two years ago has been broken. Your committee is aware that some of you are participating in the seminar and is keen to follow progress. It also agreed that there ought to be mileage in collaborating with the WNU in the nuclear knowledge project just mentioned.

The Annual General Meeting will be on the first afternoon of the IAEA’s Annual General Conference in Vienna that is on Monday 26 September. The precise time and location will be notified later. We hope that as many of you as possible will be able to attend. The next meeting of the Executive Committee will be in Versailles on 11 December in the margins of ENC and back to back with a meeting of INSC.

Gerald Clark - Secretary INEA
June 2005

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