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Sandia National Laboratories has initiated many joint research and development projects with the two premier Russian nuclear laboratories, VNIIEF and VNIITF, (historically known as Arzamas-16 and Chelyabinsk-70) in a wide spectrum of areas. One of the areas in which critical dialogue and technical exchange is continuing to take place is in the realm of system surety. Activities primarily include either safety or security methodology development, processes, accident environment analyses and testing, accident data-bases, assessments, and product design. Furthermore, a continuing dialog has been established between the organizations with regard to developing a better understanding of how risk is perceived and analyzed in Russia versus that in the US. The result of such efforts could reduce the risk of systems to incur accidents or incidents resulting in high consequences to the public. The purpose of this paper is to provide a current overview of the Sandia surety program and its various initiatives with the Russian institutes, with an emphasis on the program scope and rationale. The historical scope of projects will be indicated. A few specific projects will be discussed, along with results to date. The extension of the joint surety initiatives to other government and industry organizations will be described. This will include the current status of a joint Sandia/VNIIEF initiative to establish an International Surety Center for Energy Intensive and High Consequence Systems and Infrastructures.

Over forty safety and security related research and development projects have been initiated between Sandia National Laboratories and the Russian nuclear weapons laboratories VNIIEF and VNIITF. About half of these projects have been completed. All relate to either safety or security methodology development, processes, accident environment analysis and testing, accident databases, assessments or product design of devices. All projects have a potential benefit to various safety or security programs and some may directly have commercial applications. In general, these projects could benefit risk assessments associated with systems that could result in accidents or incidents having high public consequences. These systems typically have already been engineered to have very low assessed probabilities of occurrence of such accidents or incidents. This paper gives an overview of the Sandia surety program with a focus on the potential for future collaboration between Sandia, three Russian Institutes; VNIIEF, VNIITF and VNIIA, and other industry and government organizations. The intent is to serve as an introduction to a roundtable session on Russian Safety Collaboration at the 14th International System Safety Conference. The current Sandia collaboration program scope and rationale is presented along with the evolved program focus. An overview of the projects is given and a few specific projects are briefly highlighted with tangible results to date.