St. Nicolas meeting of Czech Young Generation

St. Nicolas Meeting is a conference which is organized annually by the Czech Young Generation of the Czech Nuclear Society since 2001. The meeting takes place usually in the first week of the December, on St. Nicholas day, and lasts three days, although in the early years it was only one day long.

The main reason for establishment of the meeting was presentation of competition of the best master theses in nuclear engineering, which are selected by the Czech Nuclear Society. The awards for the best theses are given at the St. Nicolas Meeting and these theses are also presented here with other works of young professionals.

Fig. 1: Awardees of St. Nicholas Meeting 2013

Nowadays the meeting covers many topics of the nuclear power industry – nuclear chemistry, nuclear fuel performance, computational simulations etc. Visitors of the meeting are not only from the Czech Young Generation, but also from Slovakia Young Generation. The conference is also regularly visited by senior professionals, who are friends and supporters of Young generations but are not members any more.

In the previous years the meeting took place at the Energy institute at the Department of Power Engineering at Faculty of Mechanical Engineering Brno University of Technology but due to the renovation of the Energy institute building, the meeting was moved to the Department of Electrical Power Engineering at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Communication Brno University of Technology.

The last St. Nicolas Meeting took place in the period of 4 – 6 December 2013 and was started with a speech of prof. Matal, who was a guarantor of this meeting since beginning and asserted for high standards of the meeting for the whole time of its existence. The first day was focused on the presentation of one of the main guests of the meeting and contributions from the fields of numerical computations, seismic PSA analysis, future of the power industry in the Czech Republic etc.

Fig. 2: Meeting was also briefly attended by his patron, St. Nicholas, and his two aides: angel from the Heaven and devil from the Hell. Resemblance of all three apparitions to colleagues from Prague and Brno is purely coincidental.

The second day started with presentation of the awarded theses. Among them the topics of numerical simulations, material science and design issues of experimental devices were presented. Other young professional’s presentations were from the field of nuclear power industry; the second day was mostly focused on the issues from nuclear chemistry and decommissioning. 27 contributions were presented in total with most of the authors being young professionals and students.

Presentation of the main guests is a traditional part of the meeting. This year the main guests of the meeting were chosen on the basis of the ongoing tender for the building of Units 3 and 4 at Temelín NPP. Two consortia are recently considered in the competition: Westinghouse Electric Company - Westinghouse Electric CR (consortium Westinghouse) and SKODA JS – Atomstroyexport–Gidropress (consortium MIR).The first main guest of the meeting was Andreas Fristedt-Åblad from Westinghouse Company who presented AP1000 project. The second main guest was Jan Zdebor from SKODA JS, a.s., which is a member of Consortium MIR. Mr. Zdebor presented the project MIR 1200.

The last day of the conference was reserved for technical visits. On the previous meeting in2012 the participants could choose between visiting a training centre for nuclear power plant operators or heating plant. This year the technical visit was focused on an incineration plant.

Last but not least are the social evenings. The St. Nicolas meeting serves also for informal meeting of participants and generally hospitality of Brno is enjoyed in large extent by all participants. Usually an evening sightseeing tour is arranged for the participants and very often a social evening is prepared in one of the small pubs of Brno.

Jitka Matejkova, Czech YGN