NSSPI organized a meeting of the participants in the Russian Academic Program in Nonproliferation and International Security (RAP-NIS) at the Labor Spiez in Switzerland during the week of May 31, 2010 to discuss the past successes and future direction of the program. RAP-NIS is a collaboration various international partners to develop nuclear nonproliferation education programs in the U.S. and Russia.
Representatives of NSSPI-TAMU included NSSPI director Dr. William Charlton, NSSPI associate research engineer Claudio Gariazzo, and Dr. Lee Peddicord, director of the Nuclear Power Institute. Other participants included: Dr. Victor Bolyatko and Dr. Nikolay Geraskin of the National Research Nuclear University (NRNU) at the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MEPhI), Dr. Irina Vorobieva and Dmitry Klinov of the Obninsk Institute for Nuclear Power Engineering (IATE), Cathy Dixon, director of University Research Alliance at West Texas A&M University, and Dr. Alan Tkaczyk of the University of Tartu in Estonia.
Additional funding from the Department of Energy’s International Nuclear Safeguards and Engagement Program (INSEP) made it possible for NSSPI to include students in the meeting. NSSPI students Braden Goddard, Adrienne LaFleur, Jessica Feener, and Travis Gitau presented their research in developing safeguards instrumentation and systems implementation. Students from the two Russian universities also presented their research at the meeting.
The Switzerland trip included a site visit to the Large Hadron Collider at CERN outside of Geneva, several visits to restaurants and castles, and a trip to the Ballenberg Outdoor Museum. These activities encouraged the young people who participated in these meetings to form contacts and networks at an early stage in their careers with other future leaders in the area of nuclear safeguards.