On Wednesday, 9 August 2023, the Supervisory Board of the Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung mbH (BGE) appointed Iris Graffunder and Marlis Koop as new managing directors from 1 January 2024 onwards. They will succeed the Chair of the Management Board, Stefan Studt, and the Managing Director responsible for site selection, Steffen Kanitz. Studt will leave the BGE in September 2023 after five years, while Kanitz already left the company in June. Iris Graffunder will take over as Chair of the Management Board and will be responsible for the areas of site selection, product control and finances in particular. As Labour Director, Marlis Koop will primarily attend to the areas of human resources and social affairs. The Chair of the Supervisory Board, Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Environment Ministry Christian Kühn, welcomes the new appointments: “With Iris Graffunder and Marlis Koop, the Supervisory Board has recruited two highly experienced experts for the BGE Management Board. I look forward to working with them and wish them all the best when they take up their roles in the new year.”
Dr Thomas Lautsch, Technical Managing Director of the BGE, says: “The BGE Management Board is gaining two experienced experts, and I’m certain that the company will be in a stronger position thanks to the efforts of Iris Graffunder and Marlis Koop. I look forward to welcoming them to the team as we continue developing the BGE into a modern project company. We’ve already made good progress, but we’re still a long way from our objective of building and decommissioning repositories and identifying a site for high-level radioactive waste.”
Iris Graffunder has been Chair of the Management Board of Kerntechnische Entsorgung Karlsruhe GmbH (KTE) since 2021. Prior to that, in May 2020, she had already been appointed to the management of the subsidiary EWN in the capacity of Technical Managing Director. Graffunder is a member of the Nuclear Waste Management Commission (ESK), the most important advisory body of the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection (BMUV) in this field. Until now, she has spent her professional life working on the dismantling of nuclear facilities and the management of radioactive waste, primarily at what is now KIT Campus Nord (the former Karlsruhe Nuclear Research Centre). After working at Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe from 1989 to 2006, she took over as project manager for the dismantling of high-activity areas at the Wiederaufarbeitungsanlage Karlsruhe GmbH (WAK) reprocessing plant. From 2009 to 2020, Graffunder acted as an authorised signatory at EWN Entsorgungswerk für Nuklearanlagen GmbH – which has around 700 employees – and built up the Konrad Coordination Office, a public-sector body tasked with ensuring that low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste from the research facilities and the EWN sites finds its way to the Konrad repository.
Iris Graffunder says: “After 30 years of experience with radioactive waste, I look forward to bringing my knowledge to the BGE and playing an active role in the implementation of final disposal in Germany.”
Marlis Koop has been Head of Labour Relations, Compensation & Benefits & Compliance at TÜV Nord AG in Hannover since 2019. She looks back on a wealth of experience as a director of human resources. Before joining TÜV, she held a managerial position in the human resources department of Berlin’s public transport company, BVG. Prior to that, she worked in managerial roles in organisational development and human resources at two companies in the Deutsche Telekom Group for almost 10 years. With her move to TÜV, Koop returned to her home region of Hildesheim.
Koop says: “The BGE is a company with a complex history and an important role to play in the future. I look forward to successfully shaping this role as the future Labour Director in collaboration with employees and through worker participation.”
About the BGE
The BGE is a federally owned company within the portfolio of the Federal Environment Ministry. On 25 April 2017, the BGE assumed responsibility from the Federal Office for Radiation Protection as the operator of the Asse II mine and the Konrad and Morsleben repositories. In addition to the decommissioning of the Gorleben mine, its other tasks include searching for a repository site for the disposal of high-level radioactive waste produced in Germany on the basis of the Repository Site Selection Act, which entered into force in May 2017. The managing directors are Stefan Studt (Chair) and Dr Thomas Lautsch (Technical Managing Director).
