Nuclear Society of Russia: Ten years in the world nuclear community
A nuclear society, which is a nongovernmental organization of nuclear professionals, appeared in the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980s--when social conditions for such a society had matured. Deep changes in the entire country's social consciousness had promoted the specialists understanding of the need to unite in order to overcome the nuclear community's dissociation, the monopoly of the nuclear ministry, and the secrecy syndrome of all nuclear issues. The new public association announced the guiding principles of its activities to be openness and glasnost and completeness and truthfulness of information supplied to decision makers and to the society as a whole. Important to the information system of the NSR are topical meetings and seminars on quite varied but always actual problems of nuclear energy use, often with foreign participation. The variety of these NSR meeting subjects is illustrated by the titles of several meetings of the last 2 yr: Safety Culture in Nuclear Power, Youth and the Plutonium Challenge, Nuclear Fuel for Mankind, Nuclear Power in Space, Radiation Legacy of the Former-USSR, the Murmansk International Forum Nuclear Fleet and Ecology, and many others. A special place among NSR seminars belongs to the annual meeting, Nuclear Energy and Public Opinion, the Russian analog of the European PIME conference. Starting from distribution of ENS periodicals--the Nuclear Europe Worldscan magazine and Nucleus information sheet--among its members, the NSR soon began publishing its own Informational Bulletin (since 1989). Note that in the first years of the Nuclear Society's existence, it has been possible to publish periodicals, conference proceedings, and even books in English. Unfortunately, financial difficulties of the last years have frozen this most useful activity, which the NSR, however, hopes to resume. In the last period, the materials of the international information agency NucNet, which provides both regular information for the analysis of nuclear energy production trends and--most importantly for relations with the mass media and the public--crisis information (latest examples: Tokaimura, the virtual Y2K crisis, etc.), have become important sources of information for the NSR. It should be emphasized that the financial participation of the Russian Minatom (maintained at the insistent request of the NSR) in the NucNet system provides sufficiently wide dissemination of operative nuclear information not only through the NSR headquarters but also via its regional branches and separate enterprises. From its side, NSR has assumed the responsibility for the adequate flow of information on Russian nuclear events to NucNet. As a living and developing organism, the NSR wants to respond to its time's challenges. Several prospective directions could be among the NSR information exchange plans: (1) Independent international analysis of the problems of the use of nuclear energy, which is presently in a stagnation period but with future large-scale development, is as possible today as it never had been before. (2) In the field of public relations, many achievements of Russian and US specialists (in the form of articles, analyzing nuclear energy on the popular and highly professional level) stay inaccessible to others because of the language barrier. A possible joint ANS/NSR project on selection, translation, and exchange of such materials, with their further wide publication, represents an obvious reserve in their societies' information activities. (3) The International Youth Nuclear Congress project (proposed by the Russian nuclear youth and supported by ANS and ENS), conceived as a bridge between generations and a forum for opinion exchange between young nuclear specialists from various countries, deserves further development and appropriation of permanent status in the activities of the world nuclear societies.
- Research Organization:
- Nuclear Society of Russia (RU)
- OSTI ID:
- 20086949
- Journal Information:
- Transactions of the American Nuclear Society, Vol. 82; Conference: 2000 Annual Meeting - American Nuclear Society, San Diego, CA (US), 06/04/2000--06/08/2000; Other Information: PBD: 2000; ISSN 0003-018X
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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