Dirk Mallants
Dirk Mallants
- Dirk has a background in soil and groundwater hydrology. He combines a strategic vision for business opportunities with a rapid response to government and industry requests.
- Primary Emaildirk.mallants@csiro.au
Biography
Dr Dirk Mallants has a background in soil and groundwater hydrology with more than 30 years of experience in characterising and modelling water flow and contaminant transport in complex environments – typically variably-saturated soils, aquifers and low-permeable porous media including aquitards and man-made materials such as concretes and bentonite clays. He specialises in whole-of-system understanding by integrating experimental observations and coupled numerical models.
Dirk Mallants visiting the underground research facility for high-level radioactive waste disposal in Horonobe, Japan.
His work involves advanced parameterisation of pore-scale and field-scale spatial variability in flow and transport properties using tracers, modelling processes of water flow and contaminant transport across a range of spatial scales, and the evaluation by means of process-based models of management options for water-related environmental pollution problems.
His research on complex soil‐groundwater systems to inform human health risks from coal seam gas chemicals (National Chemicals Assessment) is innovative, responsive, and at the cutting edge of policy and praxis, and provides to government and industry methods/tools to better manage risks.
From 2020 to 2023, Dirk lead an internally funded RD&D program exploring the opportunities for deep borehole disposal of intermediate-level radioactive waste. This multi-disciplinary program brought together CSIRO experts in deep rock characterisation, molecular dynamics simulation, tectonic fault modelling, borehole stability assessment, material science, coupled heat-mass transport modelling, and post-closure safety assessment.
In 2016 he was appointed as a subject matter expert for the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission and State-wide Community Consultation Agency. The Agency won the 2016 International Association of Public Participation (IAP2) Australasia Project of the Year Award. Dr Mallants has also been involved with back-end impact assessment studies for the nuclear fuel cycle in Europe (Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovak Republic, Slovenia), South-America (Argentina), and Asia (China, Indonesia, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, The Philippines). Through his career he has supported numerous waste management agencies with site selection, site investigations, safety assessment, and the development of safety cases for surface and deep repositories of low level and high level radioactive waste.
His engagement with community partnerships as part of a long-term nuclear repository development program in Belgium was described in the March 2013 issue of ECOS Magazine:
“Successful examples of public participation also exist in community partnerships around nuclear repository programs in Europe, Canada and Asia. The search for suitable sites for radioactive waste disposal has a history of conflicts, delays, and sometimes failure. In response, waste management institutions have progressively turned away from the traditional one-way flow of information and are now embracing the ‘engage-interact-cooperate’ approach with opportunity for feedback and negotiation. This shift has fostered the emergence of sound partnerships between the proponents of disposal facilities and potential host communities.”
Under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), he has lectured dozens of training courses on subsurface characterisation, site evaluation and remediation, and safety assessments for wastes associated with the nuclear fuel cycle including tailings from mining and milling.
He was previously Project Leader for Low-Level Radioactive Waste Disposal and Environmental Studies and Head of the Performance Assessments Unit at the Belgian Nuclear Research Centre, SCK•CEN.
He has been the recipient of Fellowships from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (twice) and the Research Foundation Flanders.
Dr Mallants graduated as geo-environmental engineer (soil physics) at the Faculty of Agricultural and Applied Biological Sciences of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL), Belgium. From 1992 to 1993 he was research associate at the University of California Riverside. In 1996 he obtained a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) in soil physics also from the KUL.