The second of a series of international conferences on plutonium will be held in Santa Fe, NM, this summer, July 10-13. It follows the highly successful 1997 conference, "Plutonium Futures - The Science," which attracted over 300 participants representing 14 countries. The U.S. participants, who made up about 70 percent of the total participants, came from Department of Energy national laboratories and a score of universities and industries. As in 1997, the conference is sponsored by the Los Alamos National Laboratory in cooperation with the American Nuclear Society.
From the beginning, the conference organizers recognized that there are a multitude of issues surrounding plutonium and other actinides and that both short- and long-term solutions to managing the global nuclear materials threat rest ultimately on the scientific and technological knowledge base. Thus, one of the main objectives of the conference is to provide an opportunity to present and assess our current understanding of plutonium and actinide sciences and to focus on the science needed for solving important national and international issues associated with plutonium. Another equally important objective is to inform the public, our stakeholders as well as the scientists, and to attract today's students who will carry on the task of solving the nuclear issues into the next century.
We are pleased to present the preliminary conference program in this issue of Actinide Research Quarterly. As in the first conference, we have an exciting collection of some 180 invited and contributed papers with topics ranging very broadly in materials science, transuranic waste forms, nuclear fuels and isotopes, separations, actinides in the environment, detection and analysis, actinide compounds and complexes, and condensed matter physics of actinides. These papers, presented in separate oral and poster sessions, will give attendees a chance to learn about current research outside of their particular specialties and provide an opportunity for interdisciplinary discussions among the participants.
For this year's conference program, two striking features to be noted are a dramatic increase in international papers and a significantly increased number of students who have contributed papers. Both aspects of this conference are welcome developments after extensive efforts by the organizers and a few support staff at Los Alamos who have communicated with colleagues worldwide.
With the presentation of the conference preliminary program in Actinide Research Quarterly, the organizers also wish to acknowledge the Basic Energy Science Office of Department of Energy for providing funds for the students' participation and the Associate Laboratory Directorates for Nuclear Weapons and Threat Reduction at Los Alamos for their generous support of the conference.
Hope to see you all at the conference in July.
Conference Program Co-Chairs
K. C. Kim and Sam Pillay
This article was contributed by Roberta N. Mulford and Wendel Brown (NMT-15)
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