JNMM Roundtable - 61st Annual Meeting

Markku Koskelo: For those of you who are new to this venue, my name is Markku Koskelo. I am the current Technical Editor of the Journal of Nuclear Materials Management for the INMM. I work for Aquila Technologies Group in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Before we get into the actual questions, let me introduce our distinguished guests, even though Ambassador Zlauvinen spoke this morning and was introduced. Perhaps not everyone was there. Thank you very much for your talk and very interesting thoughts for all of us. Welcome to this Roundtable event. Ambassador Zlauvinen is the President-Designate of the 10th NPT Review Conference. Before taking up this role, he has served as the Deputy Foreign Minister, the Undersecretary of State for Foreign Policy, and the Director of International Organizations, all in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Argentina. He was twice posted to the U.N. system as the Representative of the Director General of the IAEA to the United Nations in New York, and the Chef de Cabinet to the Executive Chairman of the United Nations Special Committee on Disarmament of Iraq or UNSCOM, and served as Argentina’s Alternate Representative to IAEA in Vienna, and as Director for International Affairs of the Argentine National Space Agency. Mr. Massimo Aparo is the Deputy Director General and Head of the Department of Safeguards at the IAEA during his tenure at DDG Safeguards. Mr. Aparo has successfully launched a number of initiatives aimed at improving the efficiency and effectiveness of safeguards, including the SLA improvement project, among other internationally-focused projects. He has been an advocate for transparency across the department and with member states and the recently published and newly-formatted Safeguards Implementation Report for 2019, and was highly praised for this effort. Recently, Mr. Aparo led that safeguard staff through a remote working period due to COVID-19, ensuring that all critical activities were able to continue, despite the global pandemic. He will speak for us tomorrow morning, and I encourage all of you to attend his Plenary talk tomorrow. Beyond the introductions, let me get a couple of housekeeping issues out of the way. Again, for those of you who are not familiar with this venue, this is being recorded. This event has always been recorded for a transcript of this event that will be published in a future issue of the JNMM and the protocol is that our distinguished guests will get the first chance to review that transcript. And if there is anything that they do not want published in writing, they have the right to edit that transcript. Once they have edited their transcript, it will be sent to everyone who asked questions and they are allowed to make sure that their questions are transcribed correctly. If the Plenary speakers make changes to their answers, please make sure that your questions match. And once we have all of that in writing, we will publish this in a future issue of the JNMM. We normally have this in a physical Roundtable, and I ask the person to my left to start introducing themselves. However, since we are in a virtual situation, I did send out a document where I suggested an order in which people would introduce themselves. If you would do that briefly and mention two things: one is your role in the INMM, and whatever you wish to say briefly about your day job. And then we will launch into the questions in the same order. And if there’s someone who wishes to pass on their turn in the question, then let’s do that. So, with that, Carrie, if you would kick off the introductions.