Robert Jan van den Berg
Herman Damveld

January 2000

Herman Damveld has been working on nuclear energy since 1976. He developed an interest in the subject when there were plans for the storage of nuclear waste in the northern Dutch salt domes, and plans for a nuclear power plant at the Eemshaven, near the Waddensea. Since the early ‘80s, he has given many lectures on these subjects, under a Broad Societal Discussion on nuclear energy. In recent years, he has worked as an independent researcher and publicist, and has written a number of books about nuclear energy, the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant (on request of Greenpeace), and the storage of nuclear waste. Hundreds of his articles have been published in weekly magazines and regional newspapers. Previous to this study, he wrote on request of the Dutch Commission for Radioactive Waste Disposal (CORA) a report on the social and ethical aspects of the retrievable storage of nuclear waste.

Robert Jan van den Berg is an employee of the Laka Foundation, the documentation and research centre on nuclear energy. Laka maintains an extensive archive on nuclear energy and related matters. Laka gives information and advise to media, scholars, individuals, etc. In cooperation with his colleagues, Van den Berg has, among others, published articles on the greenhouse effect and on nuclear energy, the airplane crash on Amsterdam’s Bijlmer district, the dismantling of a research complex in Amsterdam, and the dismantling of nuclear weapons. He co-operated with Damveld in the study on ethics and retrievability.