SCK CEN inaugurates MaT building
10-year-olds bring future dismantling and radioactive waste workshop to life
Today, scientists from SCK CEN granted Ketnet 'Hero' Sieg De Doncker and eighteen 10-year-olds the honour of inaugurating their brand new ‘MaT’ building. This was ‘the only, logical choice,’ the nuclear research centre said in a statement. “We actually put up this building for them,” said Didier Léonard, Director of the Sustainable Waste Management & Decommissioning Institute. “Our mission is not to saddle future generations with the challenges of nuclear decommissioning and managing radioactive waste. We need to take action now and that's what we are doing with MaT.” Inside the MaT building, the nuclear research centre will continue and even expand its dismantling and decontamination activities.
Europe is on the eve of dismantling an estimated 100 nuclear reactors and 200 medical cyclotrons by 2045. “As a sector, it is our duty to act today to reduce the ecological footprint of this and leave behind a responsible nuclear legacy,” said Didier Léonard, Director of the Sustainable Waste Management & Decommissioning Institute. With its brand-new MaT building, the nuclear research centre SCK CEN is taking an important step forward in order to ensure that future generations are not saddled with this challenging task. The building, which provides no less than 1440 m2 of floor space, and will become an innovative workshop for sustainable decommissioning and for identifying solutions for the treatment and conditioning of radioactive waste. Today, that building was inaugurated in the presence of ... that future generation.
In fact, SCK CEN invited the Year 5 pupils from the neighbouring school VBS De Toren and their parents and grandparents to come and learn about the building and its activities. So today, the children rolled up their sleeves and got creative. “Their activities included making detailed passports for eggs, designing temporary egg safes, packaging the eggs to prevent breakages if dropped and separating the egg yolk in order to reuse it as paint. These might seem eggceptionally peculiar assignments, but all of them symbolise the four core activities we will actually be carrying out inside the MaT building,” continued Nele Weyens, Deputy Director of the Sustainable Waste Management & Decommissioning Institute. And the children themselves didn't come unprepared either: together with SCK CEN, they had already explored the topic in class.
Four core activities of MaT
What activities are we talking about? MaT is an abbreviation and stands for Material Treatment. The building takes care of four crucial steps in the processing of (radioactive) waste:
- Interim storage:
This provides temporary storage for radioactive waste pending further treatment and transportation to Belgoprocess.
- Characterisation
MaT will be a unique development and testing platform for characterisation techniques for SCK CEN's scientists. Their research will improve their measurement accuracy and thereby set new precision and efficiency standards in characterisation (and documentation). And that precision will be of crucial importance in order to verify and ensure that the material meets NIRAS/ONDRAF's requirements for surface disposal or is safe for release.
- Material treatment
In workshops at MaT, SCK CEN will test out techniques such as decontamination, cutting and sandblasting and the nuclear research centre will study the effect of these actions on various materials being dismantled. By carrying out comparative studies, researchers are evaluating how those methods can help minimise radioactive waste and promote the reuse of materials. Thanks to this practical experience, we are expanding our already substantial expertise and are therefore able to play a major advisory role in decommissioning projects.
- Conditioning
SCK CEN researches and develops ways to secure and package radioactive waste. In MaT, researchers are focusing on cementation recipes. After numerous lab tests, they can now test them at full size - 1:1 scale - in MaT. That research should provide evidence of their stability and scalability and therefore contribute towards Belgium's radioactive waste management programme. All this is taking place in close consultation with ONDRAF/NIRAS and Belgoprocess, which are jointly responsible for managing radioactive waste in Belgium.
Successor to BR3
The arrival of the MaT building does not mark the actual onset of new activities, however. The new building actually provides the space to continue and even expand SCK CEN's existing dismantling activities and its research into radioactive waste. And that is certainly a necessity. “The current workshops where we cut up and decontaminate dismantled materials coming from our own nuclear facilities or from third parties are located in the Belgian Reactor 3 (BR3) building. The dismantling of BR3 is now nearing completion. The reactor vessel, cooling circuits and machine room were already removed some time ago, and recently, the biological shield was also demolished. Now, we are focusing on the final step – dismantling the workshops themselves,” clarified Didier Léonard. However, the activities that SCK CEN conducts in those workshops will continue to be highly important – both for SCK CEN and others. That is why they are being relocated to the new MaT building and will even be expanded. “Researching and developing new techniques for third parties is done for them and in collaboration with them. This building will bring our experts and companies specialising in dismantling and waste management together. The MaT building will therefore become a Belgian innovation hub!” concluded Didier.
Support from the Belgo-European Plan for Recovery and Resilience
The new MaT building has been completed and is now ready to fulfil its social role. Official commissioning is scheduled for 2025. Until then, SCK CEN is taking its time to install and test all the specialist equipment needed to make the building operational. That innovation hub owes its creation in part to the Belgo-European Recovery and Resilience Plan, which partially funded its construction.
