With the end of the Cold War, new opportunities for interaction have
opened up between the United States and the countries of the Former
Soviet Union. Many of these important initiatives involve the US
Department of Energy (DOE) and the Ministry of the Russian Federation
for Atomic Energy (MINA TOM). Currently, collaboration is under way
which involves reactor safety, the disposition of fissile materials from
the weapons program, radioactive waste disposal, and the safety of
nuclear warheads. Another fruitful area of interchange resulted from the
radiochemical storage tank accident at the site of the Siberian Chemical
Compound at Tomsk-7 in 1993. DOE and MINATOM agreed to meet and exchange
information about the accident for the purposes of improving safety. A
meeting on the Tomsk tank accident was held in Hanford, Washington in
1993, followed by a second meeting in st. Petersburg, Russia in 1994 in
which the agenda expanded to include radiochemical processing safety. A
third exchange took place in 1995 in Los Alamos, New Mexico, and
additional papers were presented on nonreactor nuclear safety. Following
a planning session in 1996 in Seattle, Washington, it was decided to
hold a fourth technical exchange on the broader subject of nuclear
materials safety management. Through a grant from the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) Disarmament Programme, the meeting took place
on March 17- 21, 1997, in Amarillo, Texas as a NATO Advanced Research
Workshop (ARW) through grant no. DISRM 961315.