Year
1964
Abstract
This is an informal discussion and not a paper. In preparing it I attempted to put to one side the experiences of the past nearly 20 years in the Nuclear Industry so that a fresh and new look could be taken of Nuclear Material Management. This is an exercise I commend to you. The viewpoint adopted for the purpose of this paper is a management viewpoint that observes nuclear materials in an objective manner as simply another asset that is to be managed in accordance with good business practice and sound economic principles. Full recognition, of course, must be given to the unique characteristics of nuclear material. Certainly all laws of the land must be obeyed and the public health and welfare must be safeguarded. Please do not interpret any of these remarks as implying otherwise. However, within statutory and other mandatory parameters, uranium, and particularly low enrichment uranium and most other nuclear material should be most treated as any other asset. They warrant neither greater nor lesser attention than cash, gold, copper, finished inventory, machine tools, land or buildings of comparable value. The decisions to be made in any asset management situation are basically economic in nature, and so should they be with nuclear materials. Having adopted the thesis that good business practice and sound principles of asset management should be applied to nuclear materials, a question immediately arises. What are these practices and principles? To help identify them a brief review was made of several businesses and industries that have interesting and demanding asset problems. A list of industries studied includes the Banking Industry, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania Liquor Commission, the Fur Industry, a Metals Manufacturing concern and finally a large Multiple- Plant Manufacturing Company.