Under the theme “Meeting the Moment: Nuclear Stewardship in an Age of new technology and Global tensions”, the 65th annual meeting of the Institute for Nuclear Materials Management INMM took place in Portland, United States, from July 21 to 26, 2024. Lukas Rademacher and Malte Göttsche from CNTR participated.
Reliable and widely accepted verification measures are indispensable for the success of sustained efforts to achieve nuclear disarmament. One of the aspects of the disarmament process is the accounting and control of stocks of fissile material. Suitable verification methods for this connection can be provided by the toolbox of “nuclear archaeology” – a catalogue of methods that concentrates on the reconstruction of the production and extraction history of fissile material. Lukas Rademacher, with the participation of Malte Göttsche, gave the lecture “Forensic Measurements for Nuclear Archaeology - Trawsfynydd revisited”. The lecture dealt with the reconstruction of reactor histories on the basis of forensic measurements of reactor structures, and thus covered the doctoral project of Lukas Rademacher.
In another lecture, the work with the archives of the Karlsruhe Nuclear Waste Management was covered. The lecture “Reconstructing nuclear histories with archives - hands-on lessons learned”, held by Sophie Kretzschmar, Lukas Rademacher and Malte Göttsche, highlighted opportunities and obstacles of document-based nuclear archaeology. In particular, it addressed the question of how different types of information from documentation can be evaluated in order to build trust in a declared production history. Together with the former nuclear research program from Karlsruhe, access to the archives was granted to research a real case scenario.
The annual meeting of the INMM is an international forum for the exchange of the latest technical information on all aspects of nuclear material management. Sessions are held each year on afeguards and security, nonproliferation and arms control, international safeguards, facility operations, packaging and transportation, spent fuel, information surety, inspections, containment and surveillance, measurement technology, nuclear processing, education and training, and physical protection. Over 50 concurrent educational sessions were held during the four-day meeting.
