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

On 8 December 1997 Belgium has signed the Joint Convention. The Belgian legislator has expressed its consent with the obligations resulting from the Convention via the Law of 2 August 2002. The ratification was obtained on 5 September 2002. The Convention became effective on 4 December 2002, or 90 days after the Ratification Act had been deposited. Belgium belongs to the group of Contracting Parties having at least one operational nuclear generating unit on their territory. Belgium has indeed developed an important nuclear energy programme, which includes at present 7 operational nuclear power plants producing a joint electric potential of approx. 6 051 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 1988-1990. Through its approval - in October 1990 - of the undermentioned recommendation, the Senate has clearly expressed the wish to pursue these continuous 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 Irradiated Fissile Materials 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 2000. By means of the Law of 31 January 2003, the Political Authorities have finally chosen to abandon the use of fission nuclear energy for industrial electricity production; this was done by prohibiting the building of new nuclear power plants and by limiting the operational period of the existing nuclear power plants to 40 years. This law will indeed have considerable consequences for the future of the nuclear sector in Belgium, but, in the short term, it will not have any implications for the radioactive waste management sector. Belgium is a member of IAEA and NEA. Its representatives take an active part in the activities regarding the radioactive waste management, such as the Radioactive Waste Management Committee (RWMC) of the NEA and the Waste Safety Standards Committee (WASSC) of the IAEA.