Werner Bühlmann

Werner Bühlmann was appointed as a member of the ENSI Board on 1 January 2012.

After his retirement at the end of May 2011, he worked as an expert consultant for the Swiss Federal Office of Energy (SFOE) between June and December 2012.

Between April 1980 and his retirement at the end of May 2012, he worked for the SFOE. He was initially Head of the Legal Service and then from January 2000 he became Head of the Law and Safety Department (Vice Director, then Deputy Director from May 2005), with responsibility for all the SFOE’s legal affairs. This specifically included preparing legislation in the energy sector, ranging from constitutional level texts to acts and ordinances from the initial draft stages to discussion in Parliament. His responsibilities also included the licensing procedure for nuclear facilities and power plants, especially high-voltage power lines, and, with effect from 1988, overseeing the construction and operation of high-pressure gas and oil pipelines and implementing the associated licensing procedure. When he became Head of Department in 2000, his responsibilities expanded to include matters such as non-proliferation, the protection of nuclear plants from sabotage and radioactive waste disposal (in particular drafting the sectoral plan for Radioactive Waste and implementing Stage 1 of the Sectoral Plan Procedure). During the final three years, Werner was also responsible for dams.

He gained his first professional law experience as a lawyer in the legal department of a large retail company in Zurich between 1975 and 1977, moving on to a trust management company, also in Zurich, between 1978 and 1979.

He studied law at the University of Zurich, graduating in 1971, and then went from May 1971 to July 1972 on to do an internship at the District Court of Bülach, followed from November 1973 to december 1974 by a part-time role as clerk at the High Court of Schaffhausen, before being admitted to the bar in Zurich in 1973 and obtaining his doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1975.