One day in the not-to-distant future, configuration management will be intergrated into every aspect of commercial nuclear power plant design, construction, operation, and maintenance. Configuration management will be essentially invisibile. There will be no configuration management work group. There will be no procedures for configuration management. There will be no boxes on the organizational chart with the words 'configuration management'.

This is because the evolution of configuration management is to become intergrated transparently into the standard day-to-day practices of the nuclear electrical generating facility from conception to decommissioning.

How can that be, one might ask? Configuration management is an enormously complex task, spanning work-groups, disciplines, vendors and suppliers, and often wide-ranging geographic locations.

It will happen because dedicated people will make it happen. The fact that you are reading this right now puts you in a specialized group of people interested in the future of nuclear configuration management, people dedicated to improving the practices and processes we use to manage the configuration of nuclear power plants.

It will happen because we change, to some degree, the way we think about configuration management - what it is, what it means, how we do it. This it part of the natural evolution of our understanding.

It will happen because we will create standards for communicating configuration management information, both internally within an organization, and externally, with regulators, designers, architects, engineering firms, and equipment vendors and suppliers.

There will come a day when we do not have to reconstitute the design bases to purchase a replacement component that has not been manufactured for thirty years. A day when the regulator is confident that we are in compliance with each and every requirement and commitment, without setting foot on your site. A day when we know, at any given moment, without question or research project, the precise requirements each and every component on site fulfills. A day when we can stand in front of a public town hall meeting, and say, "you can trust us", and the public will trust us, because we have a practice of transparently fulfilling all of our requirements, commitments, and obligations.

There will come a day when we can say without hesitation, "we are operating and maintaining this nuclear electrical generation facility exactly as we said we would when we licensed it", even though that license was issued sixty years ago,  and we will be accurate in our statement, because we actively manage every requirement, commitment, and obligation, exactly as we agreed.

Central to establishing the charter of the Standard Configuration Management Reference Model project is that we produce the structure and guidance necessary to move configuration management at nuclear power plants to a level where the costs and consequences of recovering desing bases information are eliminated, and where pubic trust and regulatory confidence is both warranted and deserved.