A licence application was submitted in September 2024, with no objections submitted during a one-month public consultation earlier this year.
The permit was granted by Royal Decree on 29 August and published in the Belgian Official Gazette on 26 September. Storage will take place in “thick-walled, armoured packaging, pending a final disposal solution”, according to Belgium’s Federal Agency for Nuclear Control (FANC).
Belgoprocess, which is responsible for the storage and processing of radioactive waste in Belgium, said the project aims to construct a new building as an “extension” of existing building 136X.
The new building has a rectangular floor plan, and is about 64.5 metres long, 19.5 metres wide and with a height of about 12.4 metres.
“The size of the storage hall is designed for the stacking of 397 thick-walled storage packages and there is space provided to place several dozen 2001 transport packages (with EOP samples). The waste is in a non-immobilised form in the storage packaging so that all options for subsequent processing and conditioning remain possible,” according to a FANC report on the project.
Belgium manages high-level waste from its operating and recently closed nuclear reactors at the Doel and Tihange plants, along with low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste from the production and use of radiation sources in medical, industrial and science and research activities.
Belgium’s federal law of 31 January 2003 required the phase-out of all seven nuclear electricity generation reactors in the country. Under that policy, Doel 1 was originally set to be taken out of service on its 40th anniversary – 15 February 2015. However, the law was amended in 2013 and 2015 to provide for Doel 1 to remain operational for an additional ten years and it was retired in February this year. Duel 3 was closed in September 2022 and Tihange 2 at the end of January 2023. Tihange 1 shut last week and unit 2 of the Doel plant is set to shut in November.
