NUCLEAR ENERGY CONFERENCE 2018

Over twenty years of experience in the nuclear industry commencing as an inspector of radioactive waste management with the Bulgarian Nuclear Regulatory Authority, followed by for a period of seven years work as a Waste Safety Specialist at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) dealing with development and implementation of safety standards on radioactive waste management, decommissioning, remediation and safety assessment and related international conventions. After the completion of IAEA term in 2008, Ms Batandjieva worked as an independent consultant in the areas of radioactive waste management, decommissioning, remediation, licensing and nuclear power plant site selection. 

From January 2012 until March 2014 she worked at the European Commission Institute for Energy and Transport in Petten, The Netherlands, as a Scientific/Technical Project Officer in support of DG DEVCO projects on waste management and remediation in non-EU countries. At present Ms Batandjieva is as a Policy Officer at the EC DG ENER Unit D2 “Nuclear Energy Technology, Nuclear Waste and Decommissioning” dealing with policy aspects of spent fuel and radioactive waste management, the review of implementation of the relevant Directives 2011/70/EURATOM and 2006/117/Euratom, secretariat for ENSREG Working Group 2, and Commission representation at Waste Safety Standards Committee of the IAEA. She was a Chair and a member of the General Committee of the 5th Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management Meeting.

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Ir. Jan Haverkamp (born 1959) is nuclear energy and energy policy specialist for Greenpeace and WISE (World Information Service on Energy). He is a Dutch citizen and since this year based in Amsterdam after having lived 20 years in the Czech Republic and Poland and having worked since 1985 in Central Europe. 

Trained as environmental scientist, he is since the late 1980s involved in nuclear energy issues and worked on that in all of Europe, but also South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the USA. He worked four years as Greenpeace’s EU nuclear policy advisor in Brussels, among others during the start of the Fukushima nuclear crisis and the following nuclear stress tests. He was involved in the development of the Euratom Nuclear Safety Directive, the Nuclear Waste Directive and the Directive on Basic Radiation Standards. He has a long track record on issues of nuclear transparency, especially the implementation of the Espoo and Aarhus Conventions in the nuclear sector.

He is co-founder and vice-chair of Nuclear Transparency Watch. Nuclear Transparency Watch is a Brussels based European network of independent academics, experts, members of parliament and NGOs that promotes nuclear safety and transparency in the nuclear sector.

Jan Haverkamp received his level 5B certificate as radiation protection advisor from the Technical University Delft. He was involved in radiation protection work in Spain, Japan and Ukraine. 

He teaches 'facilitation of environmental communication processes', 'the role of environmental NGOs in society' and energy policy in the Visegrad countries at the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. He has a bachelors degree in biochemistry from the State University in Leiden and a bachelors and masters degree (academic engineer) in environmental sciences from Wageningen University. 

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Roman Lahodynsky (born 1951 in Linz) received a certificate as radiation protection engineer during his military service in the ABC-Defense Unit of the Austrian armed forces. He studied geology & geophysics at University of Vienna and Technische Universität Vienna, specializing in sedimentology, brittle tectonics, rock stresses and rock slides and worked as a field geologist for the Austrian geological survey. He received his PhD in geology (event-stratigraphy, asteroid impact and sedimentology at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary) from Innsbruck University.

From 1989 to 1997 he worked for several private engineering geological bureaus in the fields of hydrogeology, waste disposal & tunneling. From 1998 to 2007 he was a staff member at the Institute of Risk Research, University of Vienna, working on geological risks for NPP sites and in an EU-China project on sustainable development of rural areas. From 2007 to 2009 he worked as senior geologist at the Lowari tunnel project and on tunnel construction for irrigation systems in Chitral, Pakistan. 2012 he was a senior scientist at the University of Central Asia (Aga Khan Foundation) in Kyrgyzstan & Tadjikistan. From 2010-2016 he worked at the Inst. of Safety & Risk Sciences, BOKU, as a lecturer and in an EU-security foresight project. Since 2013 he works as a consultant and since 2015 as honorary professor at the Institute of Mining & Mining Technology, Kyrgyzstan.

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Mgr. Matěj Machek, Ph.D. is a researcher at the department of Tectonics and Geodynamics of the Institute of Geophysics of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He is a structural geologist and in his research work, he focuses on the identification and interpretation of the deformation record in rocks and its relationship to physical rock properties. He has completed his master studies of structural geology and petrology at the Faculty of Science, Charles University in Prague and continued there with his Ph.D. studies. In his Ph.D. thesis, he has focused on pore space geometry in low porosity rocks and its relationship to rock microstructure and physical properties.

In 2015 and 2016 he was a member of the Working Group for Dialogue on the Deep Geological Repository as an expert for the representatives of the municipalities. In 2017 he was elected to newly established Scientific Committee of the „Platforma proti hlubinnému úložišti“.

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Mag^a. Gabriele Mraz, MA (born 1967) works since 1988 as a scientist at the Austrian Institute of Ecology (AIE) in Vienna and since 2014 also at the pulswerk GmbH – the consulting firm of the AIE. She studied nutrition with a focus on radioecology, and gender studies. For long years she worked in the gamma laboratory of the AIE measuring the consequences of the Chernobyl accident on soil, plants and food. Consequences and risk of nuclear accidents still are her working topic, for example in the flexRISK project illustrating the risk of NPPs for Europe (http://flexrisk.boku.ac.at/en/index.html).

Since several years she is project leader of the “Joint Project – Nuclear Risk and Public Control” (http://www.joint-project.org/). In the Joint Project, European NGOs and research institutions cooperate since 2003 on anti-nuclear activities in Central and Eastern Europe. 

Since 2014 Gabriele Mraz is head of the Austrian-German consortium “SEA national waste management programs” which has been commission by the Austrian Ministry of Sustainability and Tourism to evaluate the national nuclear waste management programs of Austria’s neighboring countries in case they conduct a transboundary SEA (Strategic Environmental Impact Assessment). 

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Ing. Petr Nohava graduated from the Faculty of Engineering of the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague. He is the mayor of the municipality Pluhův Žďár in Jindřichův Hradec district, affected by the planning of a deep repository for highly radioactive waste in the Czech Republic.

Since October 2017, Petr Nohava has also been the speaker of the Platform Against the Deep Repository. This group of municipalities and associations was established in June 2016 in response to the forceful approach of government authorities to the nuclear waste issues. The objective of the Platform is to promote a way of finding a solution to the spent nuclear fuel and radioactive waste issues that will be open and transparent and in which municipalities and the public will have sufficiently legally guaranteed capacity to protect their justified interests. At present, the Platform associates 35 members.

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Academic degree in chemical engineering (Dipl.-Ing.) from the Technische Universität Darmstadt; Germany, 1982. He has more than 35 years of experience in the field of nuclear energy, most notably regarding the safety of nuclear power plants and other nuclear installations, the storage of nuclear waste and the final disposal of radioactive waste. He is currently CEO of Öko-Institut e.V. (since 2009). Previously he was head of Öko-Institut's Nuclear Engineering and Facility Safety Division.

Öko-Institut e.V. (Institute for Applied Ecology) is an independent scientific research institute with some 170 staff in Freiburg i. Br., Darmstadt and Berlin. The institute was founded in 1977 and is a non-profit association. It gives scientific advice to governmental and non-governmental organisations. Major fields of its national and international work are:
•    Nuclear safety and waste management
•    Energy and climate issues
•    Sustainability regarding products and resources
•    Governance and public participation

He is chairman of the Nuclear Waste Management Commission (ESK), which advises the German Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety (since 2008). He was member of the German Commission on the disposal of high-level radioactive waste of the German Federal Parliament and German Federal Council, which worked from 2014 to 2016.

He was from 1999 to 2014 member of the Reactor Safety Commission  (RSK) of the German Federal Ministry for Environment, Nature Conservation, Building and Nuclear Safety and is since 2012 member of the Expert Group on Reactor Safety (ERS) of the Swiss Federal Nuclear Safety Inspectorate (ENSI).

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Ing. Edvard Sequens is Chairman of the NGO Calla – Association for Preservation of the Environment in České Budějovice, where he works as an energy consultant and energy project leader. He has a degree in Automated Control Systems from Military Technical College in Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia. He worked on the Independent Expert Committee for Assessment of the Czech Republic’s Long-term Energy Needs and as an external advisor for the Minister of the Environment. He is a member of the Sustainable Energy Committee of the Government Council for Sustainable Development. He has been involved in development of the alternative concept of the Czech energy system “Smart Energy”, and has mapped the utilisation of renewable energy sources in South Bohemia. He received the Czech Solar Award 2002 from the Czech section of Eurosolar for his work on promotion of utilisation of solar energy.

For over two decades, he has closely followed the developments in the area of nuclear waste management in the Czech Republic and assisted representatives and inhabitants of municipalities in the areas investigated for a deep repository for highly radioactive waste to be able to defend their interests more effectively. After the establishment of the governmental Working Group for Dialogue on the Deep Repository in 2010, he represented environmental organisations with nation-wide coverage in it. After the Group disintegrated, he fathered another formation of municipalities and civic associations – the Platform Against the Deep Repository, where he works as Secretary.

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Dr. Johan Swahn is the Director of the Swedish NGO Office for Nuclear Waste Review (MKG). He leads the organisation’s work, together with the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC), to review the nuclear industry’s licence application for a Swedish final repository for spent nuclear fuel. 

Dr. Swahn has a Master of Science in Engineering Physics and a doctorate degree in Science, Technology and Global Security from the Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg Sweden. His doctorate and post-doc work focused on the issues of nuclear non-proliferation, nuclear waste and military fissile material disposition.

Johan Swahn is a member of the Management Board of Nuclear Transparency Watch (NTW) and co-ordinator of the NTW work on radioactive waste management and a co-chair of the SITEX_Network. He leads a work package on civil society interaction in the EU research project Beacon. He is also a member of the International Panel for Fissile Materials, IPFM, a member of the International Nuclear Risk Assessment Group, INRAG, and a member of the Scientific Board of the Swedish chapter of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, IPPNW.

Before his present position Johan Swahn worked as a researcher and lecturer in the fields of energy, environment and global security at the Department of Physical Resource Theory at the Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden.

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Dr.-Ing. Veronika Ustohalova is a senior researcher in Nuclear Engineering and Facility Safety Division at Öko-Institut e.V., Darmstadt. She holds a diploma in hydraulic engineering and water management of Technical University Prague and in hydraulics and contaminant transport of ETH Zurich. She received her PhD in Landfill engineering and waste management  from the University of Duisburg-Essen. Her research compassed several waste management issues and contaminant transport in the environment within first years. 

At the Öko-Institut, she works since 2008 and is mainly concerned with radiation protection and nuclear emergency preparedness, radioactive and conventional waste management, several aspects of nuclear safety as well as decommissioning of nuclear installations. Her work further involves radioecological modelling with a focus on environmental impacts of nuclear installations during operation and decommissioning as well as under consideration of accident scenarios. She also deals with issue of the deterioration of state and nuclear safety infrastructures in crisis regions. Besides that, her project work encompasses socioeconomic aspects and stakeholder involvement within radioactive waste disposal, radiation protection and nuclear emergency preparedness. She is a member of European stakeholder group for developing research priorities and roadmaps to guide radiation protection and emergency preparedness research in Europe.

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