Heinrich Mandel

Heinrich Mandel (born August 11, 1919 in Prague , † January 24, 1979 in Düsseldorf ) was a German manager of the electricity industry and a leading advocate of the peaceful use of nuclear energy worldwide . He was convinced that in a fuel-poor industrial country like the Federal Republic of Germany and also in developing countries that are still undersupplied with energy, the option of nuclear energy must be implemented. How many energy economist in the world, he took the view that in the finite resources to promote oil would reach its peak between 1985 and 1995, of natural gas around the turn of the millennium . From this realization - which has meanwhile turned out to be wrong, at least for the time horizon - Mandel derived his demand that an extensive realization of the peaceful use of nuclear energy should take place promptly. Because of the predominant share of capital costs in the costs of using nuclear energy, Almond preferred nuclear power plants and their design with the comparatively lower fixed costs .

Stations

After passing the high school diploma with distinction at the Realgymnasium in Prague III, Mandel studied mechanical engineering at the Technical University in Prague from the winter semester 1938/39 , with interruptions in the military, including frontline deployment in the Ukraine , Soviet Union in 1941/42 . In 1939 he voluntarily joined the NSDAP and the General SS , and in 1941 also the Waffen SS . He also studied natural sciences, especially physics. In 1943 he passed his main examination, also with distinction. In 1944, at the age of 24, Mandel became a Dr.-Ing. PhD. This was followed by military service as SS-Untersturmführer in SS-Panzer-Repair-Department 11 and prisoner of war from May 19, 1945 to December 14, 1946. In addition to his job, he studied physics at the University of Cologne from 1950–1952 . In 1952 he was awarded a Dr. phil. PhD.

Mandel's professional career is closely linked to Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk AG , the largest European electricity supply company at the time . In 1948 he started there as an auxiliary fitter in the reconstruction of a coal-fired power plant. In 1955 he became head of the nuclear engineering department. Mandel became a deputy member of the board of the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk AG in 1961 and a full member in 1967 . In 1956 from the RWTH Aachen members teaching for reactor physics he held until his death at the age of 59 years. In 1967 he became an honorary professor in Aachen .

Mandel was President of the German Atomic Forum from 1973 to 1979 . Against the background of the first oil price crisis in 1973 , he expressed his views also with regard to disposal costs. North Rhine-Westphalia's Economics Minister Horst-Ludwig Riemer contradicted him : Including the costs of the final storage of nuclear waste and the reprocessing of plutonium, electricity from Ruhr coal is cheaper than nuclear power. He became the first chairman of the newly formed The Uranium Institute in 1975 . 1977–1979 he was chairman of the International Executive Council of the World Energy Conference and there President of the National Committee of the Federal Republic of Germany. In this role, too, he was committed to promoting the peaceful use of nuclear energy, especially for nuclear power plants with light water reactors .

From 1960 to 1979, Mandel was a member of the editorial board of the journal “atw - atomwirtschaft - atomtechnik” (today “atw - International Journal for Nuclear Power”), the official journal of the Kerntechnischen Gesellschaft eV .

Act

Mandel succeeded in convincing the decision-makers at RWE, who were in favor of converting lignite into electricity , of the profitability of using nuclear energy to generate electricity .

Mandel implemented the 16 MW experimental nuclear power plant in Kahl with a boiling water reactor as the first nuclear power plant in the Federal Republic of Germany, enforced against concerns of the reactor safety commission of the Federal Ministry for Nuclear Energy and Water Management . The power plant supplied electricity to the public grid from 1961.

Mandel is considered to be the father of the Biblis A nuclear power plant with a pressurized water reactor , in which he used the reduction in system costs per kWh through size degression to improve profitability . The power plant went into commercial operation in 1975 and, at 1225 MW, was the largest nuclear power plant in the world at the time.

Mandel assumed that there would be extensive expansion of nuclear power plants worldwide . That led to two decisions for him.

On the one hand, Mandel insisted on having large German plants for reprocessing the spent fuel elements from nuclear power plants with light water reactors in operation as early as the 1990s. In these large-scale plants, the PUREX process should be used to separate the radioactive waste to be disposed of from the usable plutonium, a chemical-physical process that was originally developed for the extraction of bomb-grade plutonium from uranium-238 irradiated with neutrons. In doing so, Mandel wanted to ensure the independence of the German electricity industry and avoid cross-border transports. The plutonium obtained was to be used as fissile material in light water reactors .

On the other hand, Mandel shared the view that the supply of the nuclear fuel uranium-235 was becoming scarce. From the mid-1960s, Mandel was convinced by Wolf Häfele , the fast breeder project manager at the former nuclear research center in Karlsruhe , that the fast breeder with sodium cooling, which uses the nuclear fuel plutonium- 239 and 241 to generate more fissile material than it consumes, could remedy this . Häfele recommended building the SNR-300 developed by the Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Center together with Siemens and Interatom . In 1972 Mandel succeeded in establishing Schnell-Brüter-Kernkraftwerksgesellschaft mbH in Essen, consisting of RWE, the Belgian Synatom and the association of Dutch electricity producers SEP . The business purpose of this company was to build and operate the fast breeder nuclear power plant in Kalkar on the Lower Rhine in the RWE supply area.

The following nuclear power plants go back to the initiative of Mandel: The light water reactors nuclear power plant Kahl , nuclear power plant Großwelzheim , nuclear power plant Biblis with units A and B , nuclear power plant Gundremmingen with units A, B and C , nuclear power plant Mülheim-Kärlich and the rapid breeder nuclear power plant Kalkar .

meaning

In the 1960s / 1970s, Mandel implemented the American light water reactor LWR in the Federal Republic of Germany, whereupon the system was also introduced in other European countries . Essential criteria for Mandel were the construction and operating experience of nuclear power plants with LWR in the USA and the lower investment costs of nuclear power plants with LWR compared to other nuclear power plants. Because of the lower installation costs of the boiling water reactor compared to the pressurized water reactor, Mandel initially favored the boiling water reactor. Mandel, who died in 1979, did not experience the failure of the large-scale reprocessing and fast breeder projects he supported.

Mandel had a decisive influence on the safety requirements of nuclear power plants with LWR. He made a clear distinction between the design-based accident of a nuclear power plant agreed for the approval, on the one hand, which the safety systems must be designed to control, and on the other hand, imaginable chains of accidents that exceed the design-based accident, which are triggered by aircraft crashes, acts of war, simultaneous, independent failure of several safety devices or bursts of the reactor pressure vessel , all events with a very low probability of occurrence . In 1971 Mandel described the risks from such unlikely accident chains as "removed" and he noted that "a consistent consideration of such general risks in all areas of life would lead to a paralysis of the economy and thus of modern life per se". Mandel warned that “disproportionate safety regulations” limit the profitability of nuclear power plants. In the discussion about a nuclear power plant at BASF in Ludwigshafen am Rhein , Mandel also referred to the reservations in the USA about operating nuclear power plants in the vicinity of large cities because of the remaining probability of a serious accident. Mandel's approach to the safety of nuclear power plants, which was based on the probability of occurrence, shaped the arguments of proponents of nuclear power plants with LWR, including risk studies - in Germany largely responsible for Adolf Birkhofer , in which the very low probability of occurrence of the hypothetical accident chains was scientifically proven by means of probabilistic analyzes . Mandel's approach found its way into German jurisprudence with the Kalkar judgment of August 8, 1978. After the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in 1979, which Mandel did not live to see, doubts arose in public about this point of view, supported also by the controversial claim of Rudolf Schulten and his surroundings, an inherently safe, commercial nuclear power plant of the pebble bed reactor type without them Possibility of the core meltdown and the bursting of the reactor pressure vessel with its consequential damage. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, Mandel's demarcation between design basis accidents and accidents beyond design basis accidents increasingly lost approval. This became clear, among other things, through the introduction of hydrogen recombiners in 1980, valve for pressure relief in 1987 and core catchers in 1998, which improved the safety of nuclear power plants with LWR, albeit at the expense of higher installation costs and a continuing risk of accidents with radioactive contamination of the power plant and the environment.

Awards

• 1974: Dr.-Ing. E. h. of the Technical University of Munich
• 1977: Dr. hc from Michigan TU Houghton

Heinrich Mandel Prize

The VGB Research Foundation awarded the Heinrich Mandel Prize annually between 1981 and 2014 for outstanding performance by young university graduates in the field of electricity and heat generation. As part of the reorganization and systematisation of its technical prizes, VGB PowerTech has been awarding this prize as an Innovation Award since 2015 , together with the Quality Award and Safety & Health Award .

literature

• Joachim Radkau:  Mandel, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 9 f. ( Digitized version ).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary for Heinrich Mandel In: atw atomwirtschaft. February 1979, p. 53.
2. ^ Heinrich Mandel: The responsibility of the industrial nations in the energy question. atw atomwirtschaft, May 1979, p. 230
3. ^ Heinrich Mandel: Handwritten curriculum vitae with picture. December 13, 1943, Federal Archives Lichterfelde
4. ↑ dws-xip.pl: Numery członków SS od 339 000 do 339 999. (Polish)
5. ^ Heinrich Mandel: Handwritten curriculum vitae with picture. December 13, 1943, Federal Archives Lichterfelde
6. ↑ Engineering dissertation: The influence of preheating, reheating and cooling on the energy conversion in gas turbines .
7. ^ German office for the notification of the next of kin of fallen soldiers of the former German armed forces (WASt), Berlin
8. ↑ Philosophical dissertation: Contribution to the question of the speed of sound in solid bodies .
9. ↑ Atomic Energy: A Chaotic Development. Der Spiegel (title), No. 1-2 / 1977, pp. 32-38
10. ^ Terence Price: Speech on the Occasion of the Institute's Twenty-Fifth Anniversary. ( Memento from February 21, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) The Uranium Institute, 2000.
11. ^ Heinrich Mandel . In: Der Spiegel . No. 50 , 1978, pp. 92 ( online ).
12. ↑ W. Marth: The fast breeder SNR-300 in the ups and downs of history. Nuclear Research Center Karlsruhe, KFK 4666, 1962.
13. ^ Joachim Radkau:  Mandel, Heinrich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 16, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1990, ISBN 3-428-00197-4 , p. 9 f. ( Digitized version ).
14. ^ Heinrich Mandel: Location issues with nuclear power plants. In: atw atomwirtschaft. 1/1971, pp. 22-26.
15. ↑ SPIEGEL interview: “My words fall into a swamp” . In: Der Spiegel . No. 50 , 1978, pp. 92-108 ( online ).
16. ^ Joachim Radkau: Atomic energy: RWE writes a wish list. In: Zeit Online. June 12, 2014, accessed June 28, 2014 . 
17. ^ Society for Reactor Safety GRS, German Risk Study Nuclear Power Plant Phase A. Cologne 1976, and Phase B. Cologne 1989.
18. ↑ Security is a dynamic term . In: Der Spiegel . No. 39 , 1987, pp. 58-61 ( online ).
19. ↑ VGB: Guideline for the award of the Heinrich Mandel Prize ( Memento of the original from December 14, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
20. ^ VGB: The winners of the Heinrich Mandel Prize