Editorial: Actinide Research Quarterly Looks Back

by K. C. Kim

This issue marks the third anniversary of the Actinide Research Quarterly. During these past three years the publication has grown both in scope and in circulation. Departing from the original scope of reporting activities strictly within the division, we have reached out to external sources for our editorial pages and contributed technical articles. The news-letter's circulation has almost doubled over this same period. In addition, all current and back issues of the Actinide Research Quarterly are now available electronically on our World Wide Web page for our international readership.*

For technical articles, because of the limited space and the nature of this newsletter, we do not expect to present a significant part of all actinide research and related activities. Instead, we summarize all publications and reports that occurred during the reporting quarter within the Nuclear Materials Technology Division, and we report only a selected few articles that we view as being of general and current interest to a broader audience. For those readers who seek further information, we provide the names of the authors and other information sources that our readers can contact directly. While the actinide science community is small, it is increasingly more important for us to communicate more effectively among its practitioners and with the general scientific community as well. It is with this goal in mind that we have reached out for contributed articles from other organizations within the Los Alamos National Laboratory, with marginal success so far.

In our editorial pages we reported diverse views on such topics as high-level policies impacting stewardship of excess plutonium, a social scientist's view of the institutional stewardship of nuclear materials and nuclear weapons, and plutonium disposal issues. The technical articles included mainly applied research and programmatic activities, although once in a while we presented the pure science aspect when it was timely. Three most notable topics reported during 1997 included the 1997 NMT Division Review in March (Spring 1997), the Plutonium Futures - The Science conference sponsored by the Los Alamos National Laboratory and held in Santa Fe (Summer 1997 and Fall 1997), and the guest article "Source of the Actinide Concept" by Glenn Seaborg, discoverer of the element plutonium as an introduction to the conference (Summer 1997).

This newsletter's writer/editor Ann Mauzy summarized the conference activities in the fall issue, which included an excellent photo display of scenes from the conference and was produced by our designer/production member Susan Carlson (photos by Mick Greenbank, CST-15).

The Plutonium Futures - The Science conference was clearly the high point among the 1997 events reported. The conference hosted over 300 participants. Over 110 technical papers were presented in diverse, actinide-related fields. This conference was indeed a smorgasbord event for all actinide researchers worldwide, and it achieved the stated objective of the conference: providing an opportunity for the international scientific community to exchange ideas, to discuss and assess current understanding of the chemical and physical properties of plutonium and other actinides, and to discuss the current and emerging science of plutonium and actinides.

One article selected from the conference, "Bacteria in Radioactive Environments" by L. Pansoy-Hjelvik, appears in this issue. We strive to inform our readers of the most current research activities in all things nuclear and actinide.

In sum, the year 1997 was a good year for the division and the newsletter. As the NMT Division and the Los Alamos National Laboratory make progress toward achieving their goal of reducing the global nuclear danger, so does the newsletter prosper in reporting their success in doing so.

*http://www.lanl.gov/Internal/divisions/NMT/nmtdo/AQarchive/AQhome/AQhom e.html

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