Alva Energy announced today that Dr. József Bánáti has joined the company as its Principal Thermohydraulics Engineer. At Alva, Dr. Bánáti will lead thermohydraulic modeling and safety analysis for the company’s uprate projects. He will be responsible for developing system-level models that predict the behavior of the nuclear steam supply system and balance of plant under both normal and transient conditions. By drawing clear lines from physics-based models to design margins, József will provide the analytical foundation for Alva’s design choices, licensing cases, and overall safety-analysis approach.

An internationally recognized expert in deterministic safety assessment, Dr. Bánáti has spent his career at the intersection of nuclear research and operating power plants. His early work in Hungary at the KFKI Atomic Energy Research Institute (AEKI) and the Paks Nuclear Power Plant included development of the VERONA on-line core-monitoring system, followed by thermohydraulic research on the PMK scaled model of Paks I. He then worked on Finland’s PACTEL test loop for the Loviisa VVER-440 units and to the Halden Reactor Project in Norway, where he co-developed the TEMPO code for thermal-performance monitoring and optimization.

Dr. Bánáti earned his PhD in Nuclear Engineering from Lappeenranta University of Technology in Finland. Later, at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, he led the development of RELAP5 validation models for the Ringhals 3 and 4 power uprates on behalf of the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (SSM). This work established a global benchmark: the Ringhals 4 project stands as the largest power uprate ever successfully executed on a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR). By linking scaled experiments with best-estimate codes, Dr. Bánáti helped pioneer the cutting-edge technology required for this historic uprate.

Most recently, Dr. Bánáti served as Head of Deterministic Safety Assessment for the Paks II new-build project. He led the world’s first comprehensive effort to migrate a VVER-1200 design to Western safety codes, running an independent safety-analysis program alongside the NSSS vendor. A highly cited researcher with nearly 80 publications, Dr. Bánáti joins Alva motivated by the opportunity to apply decades of VVER, PWR, and BWR experience to projects that add gigawatts of carbon-free capacity to the grid with uncompromising safety rigor.