Kingdom of Belgium Fourth Meeting of the Contracting Parties to the Joint Convention on the Safety of Spent Fuel Management and on the Safety of Radioactive Waste Management National Report

On 8 December 1997 Belgium signed the Joint Convention. The Belgian legislator has expressed its consent with the obligations resulting from the Convention by the Law of 2 August 2002. The ratification followed on 5 September 2002. The Convention became effective on 4 December 2002, i.e. 90 days following ratification. Belgium belongs to the group of Contracting Parties having at least one operational nuclear power plant on their territory. Belgium has indeed developed an important nuclear energy programme, which includes at present 7 operational nuclear power plants having jointly a net electric capacity of approx. 6224 MWe. The political authorities have regularly assessed the future of this nuclear energy programme, for instance according to the progress made in the management of the radioactive waste produced by these nuclear power plants. Already in 1975, the Belgian Government has installed an important committee of experts, better known as the “Commissie van Beraad inzake Kernenergie” (deliberation committee on nuclear energy). One of the recommendations of this committee was to assess the continuation of the nuclear energy programme once every ten years. Since then, these assessments have been organised on several occasions, for instance during the Parliamentary Energy Debate in the period 1982-1984 and by the ‘Parlementaire Commissie van Informatie en Onderzoek inzake Nucleaire Veiligheid’ (Parliamentary Information and Investigation Commission in the field of Nuclear Safety) between 1988 and 1990. Through its approval - in October 1990 - of the recommendation mentioned below, the Senate has clearly expressed the wish to pursue these assessments: “Once every ten years the waste issue should be thoroughly assessed. This assessment will be contributory to the future of the nuclear programmes.” This tradition of assessing the nuclear energy programme was extended through the establishment of a “parlementaire onderzoekscommissie naar de opportuniteit van de opwerking van de bestraalde splijtstof en het gebruik van MOX-splijtstof” (Parliamentary Investigation Commission on the Opportunity of the Reprocessing of Spent Fuel and the Use of MOX fuel), which has deposited its conclusions in December 1993. Finally, the activities of the ‘Commission for the Analysis of the Means of Producing Electricity and the Re-evaluation of Energy Vectors’, better known as the Commission AMPERE have to be mentioned. This Commission was installed by the Government in April 1999; its final report - containing a new assessment of the future of the nuclear electricity production – was published in October 2002