INMM 2014
The top three themes you may have missed at the 2014 Institute of Nuclear Materials Management annual conference.
Happy belated conference. Our writers may be a bit behind the curve on producing a post for INMM 2014, though your @StrategicSwag analysts did spend the better half of last week in the swampy city of Atlanta drinking sweet tea and talking shop with the many scientists and policy wonks in attendance. In that order.
Below are the three buzzwords and topics that dominated the conference:
1. Societal Verification
By far the most used catchphrase in both technical and policy-oriented panels alike, societal verification is fundamentally based on the ability of individuals to collaborate, decipher, and analyze information for verification purposes through means such as open-source code (closely related to our last post on virtual reality verification). More simply, it is a multilateral, crowdsourced, and public driven approach to verification in the ‘information age’, if you will.
Debated Pros — confidence building, multilateral cooperation, greater transparency
Debated Cons — inability to work with classified materials, potential disinformation, and bad guys getting sensitive information
2. State Level Concept (SLC)
With more than seven sessions at INMM dedicated to the topic, the SLC really took the cake at this year’s conference. The State Level Concept (also sometimes referred to as the state level approach) pushes for changes in traditional IAEA procedures to facilitate greater flexibility of inspections— similar to privileges afforded under specific comprehensive safeguards agreements (CSAs). It seeks to broaden the IAEA’s ability to inspect more freely and look at potential acquisition paths on a state level, rather than the current status quo of limited, voluntary facility access. The state level concept gauges technical difficulty of acquisition and technically plausible paths of acquisition to ensure that states meet deterrence standards — pitting speed and stealth of potential illicit proliferation; this is especially so if a country operates a robust and full nuclear fuel cycle. The SLC seeks to bolster detection probabilities and secure credible assurance.
Debated Pros — consistent safeguards, more flexibility, greater transparency and clarity, increased confidence of findings
Debated Cons — prescriptive, resource implications, potential discrimination, compromised secrecy of facilities/materials
3. 3S (Safety, Security, Safeguards)
INMM was all about the promotion of 3S culture, and we’re not referring to outdated iPhone models.
The 3S system is fairly self-evident insofar as further consolidating ‘nuclear safety culture.’ The conversation surrounding the 3S system goes to show the desire of the international community to adopt a baseline nuclear ‘work and safety culture’ that will incorporate the harmonized concepts of safety, security, and safeguards when dealing with nuclear materials. Though, many experts at the conference stated that the area of safeguards is least developed and agreed upon aspect of the 3S system.
Debated Pros — Improved safety, cohesion of safety culture, international collaboration on nuclear safety
Debated Cons — disagreement on approach, different interpretations of meaning… 3S was also sometimes referred to as 2S+2S: safety & security and security & safeguards system — though it all boils down to the same content.
With that, hope you enjoyed a quick snapshot of the top themes of INMM 2014. As always, feel free to reach out to your humble writing team at StrategicSwagger@gmail.com with comments or questions.
Written by: Marianne Nari Fisher
Edited by: Cervando A. Bañuelos II
