Lezing
SG - Our Nuclear Future
When it comes to combating the climate crisis, ambitions to decarbonise and electrify have often portrayed nuclear energy as an inevitable option for the future. Tonight we focus on this inevitability with Jan Haverkamp (WISE/Greenpeace) and Pieter Leroy (Radboud University).
About Our Nuclear Future
When it comes to combating the climate crisis, ambitions to decarbonise and electrify have often portrayed nuclear energy as an inevitable option for the future. Tonight we focus on this inevitability. How do narratives from the past stand up to potential impacts, conditions and constraints in the future? In this thorny conversation our guest speakers consider geopolitical, economic, financial and technical underpinnings of risk beyond the nation state and democracy. What does how we set out to organise the world’s demand for energy mean for societies we aspire to have in the future?
About Pieter Leroy
Pieter Leroy (Belgium, 1954) graduated as a sociologist and political scientist at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and got his PhD at Antwerp University. Throughout his career he was engaged in social and political research on environmental issues, on the environmental movement, on environmental policies, on environmental science and policy etc. From 1994 till 2019 he was professor of Political Sciences of the Environment at Radboud University, Nijmegen. Throughout his career he has been fascinated by the enduring political controversies on the nuclear as highly exemplary for the environmental issue at large.
About Jan Haverkamp
Jan Haverkamp MSc (1959) is a senior nuclear energy and energy policy expert with the World Information Service on Energy (WISE) and Greenpeace Netherlands, and he is co-founder and vice-chair of Nuclear Transparency Watch. He is a Dutch citizen and since 2017 based in the Netherlands after having lived 21 years in the Czech Republic and Poland and having worked since 1985 in Central Europe.
His work as developer of environmental organisations in Central Europe, as energy campaigner and nuclear energy specialist brought him into contact with nuclear power and energy policy in all EU and EU accession countries operating, having operated or having taken moves to operate nuclear power stations, as well as Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Switzerland, Canada, Japan, South Korea, South Africa, Taiwan, Turkey, and the USA. He also worked for 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 and following implementation 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 participates as an independent civil society expert in the European nuclear waste research project EURAD.
Jan received his level 5B certificate as radiation protection advisor from the Technical University Delft. He was involved in radiation protection work in Spain, Japan, Ukraine and France.
Jan Haverkamp has taught between 2004 and 2020 at the environmental studies department of the faculty of social sciences of the Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic.
He undertook a bachelor degree in biochemistry from the State University in Leiden, the Netherlands, and a bachelors and masters degree (academic engineer – Ir.) in environmental sciences from Wageningen University, the Netherlands.
He is married, has a son and a daughter in their twenties and three grandchildren.