This Nuclear Thursday was organized with the idea of reviewing what had happened from 1975 to 2024 at the 50 Annual Meetings organized by the Spanish Nuclear Society. The chosen place was the College of Industrial Engineers of Madrid and the talk was given by Miguel Barreiro Bugallo, who has been involved in the organization of these congresses for several years and it allows him to have a very broad vision of what the Annual Meeting means for the congressmen.
Designing this event was a challenge from the first moment, because we had to talk about what had been done in five decades in just 60 minutes, so we decided to structure the Annual Meetings into their main elements, elements that were repeated every year and that allowed take a tour of its growth and evolution.
Thus, a trip throughout the 32 host cities of the Annual Meeting was proposed, a trip that means just over 27,000 km, highlighting those cities that have hosted it twice and the only city that has hosted three editions of the congress (Santander). The next point that was shown to the attendees was the evolution of the design of the image of the congress, starting with less flexible designs, passing through the different trends in each era to the current sobriety of maintaining a logo for all the Meetings and enhancing their image.
The main point of the talk was the structures pattern of the Technical Program, what is summarized in the agility of the SNE to identify the most relevant topics at all times and present them to the congressmen with the help of the experts who best know each topic: commissioning of the first Spanish nuclear power plants, José María Ryan and Angel Pascual, Chernobyl, reviews of PEN-1983 and PEN1991, Valdecaballeros NPP, Vandellós I NPP incident, Communication, Climate Change, closure of Zorita NPP, the 2005 nuclear table , the extension of Sta. Maria de Garoña, Fukushima, COVID-19 pandemic, SMR… all these topics and many others were present in the talk and it was possible to see how each event that occurred had its reflection in the Technical Program.
A tribute was also paid to the 45 presidents of the Organizing Committee and the 22 presidents of the Technical Committee who, together with the more than 900 members of both Committees, have been responsible for undertaking all the actions and decisions that organizing an event of this magnitude entails.
After reviewing what happened with the Commercial Exhibition and the Social Events, representatives of WiN (Susana Falcón) and the Jóvenes Nucleares (Jose Luis Pérez) took part in the event, with the aim of highlighting the important role that these SNE commissions play in the different activities of the Annual Meetings. Finally, and as representatives of the presidents of the Technical Committee, Patricia Cuadrado and Eva Celma commented on curious aspects of what it means to manage the technical sessions, with their papers and speakers. The figures of its responsibility speak for themselves: 1,200 technical sessions and more than 11,000 papers managed in the 50 years of Annual Meetings.
The event ended with a cocktail where the 70 attendees had the opportunity to comment on what had been presented during the talk, in addition to sharing other tales and stories that they experienced during the congress celebrations that would write a very entertaining book.
