Researcher – Development of an Integrated Legal Framework for Future Nuclear Projects in Belgium

Researcher – Development of an Integrated Legal Framework for Future Nuclear Projects in Belgium

The Université catholique de Louvain (UCLouvain) is internationally recognized for research and teaching quality in many different fields of expert...

Federal Energy Transition Fund (Belgium)

The project aims to develop an integrated legal framework for future nuclear projects in Belgium by analyzing federal–regional competence interactions, permitting procedures, cross-border cooperation, and investment certainty, and by designing legally operable regulatory solutions.

The execution of the respective tasks shall be undertaken by UCL and UGENT in accordance with their allocated responsibilities.

O1: Mapping and typologizing regulatory interfaces: This objective seeks to produce a systematic, fine-grained understanding of how federal and regional legal regimes interact in the nuclear domain. Belgium’s nuclear governance is characterized by overlapping competences, parallel permitting streams and non-synchronized procedures. Without an analytical mapping of these interfaces, identifying where federal licensing, regional spatial planning, environmental permitting, safety regulation and EU obligations intersect, it is impossible to diagnose delays, resolve competence conflicts or design efficient procedural pathways. This objective is therefore not merely descriptive. It creates the analytical infrastructure upon which subsequent legal solutions could rely. A typology of interface-points will enable the identification of systematic bottlenecks and reveal which aspects of the regulatory architecture must be redesigned to allow new nuclear projects to move through the system predictably. A doctrinal and procedural framework that clarifies the Belgian nuclear governance landscape and fills a gap in scholarly literature, which has focused heavily on safety and liability but rarely on competence‑interaction mechanics.

O2: Designing cooperative federalism instruments fit for nuclear delivery: This objective aims to research the concrete legal instruments that allow federal and regional authorities to cooperate more effectively. While cooperation agreements exist, their current design does not fully address the procedural and substantive coordination needs of large-scale nuclear projects. Nuclear development requires integrated sequencing of licensing, environmental assessment, spatial planning and infrastructure approval, processes currently dispersed across separate legal orders. Also co‑financing possibilities by the federal and regional level should be an integral part of such instruments. Finally, the overlap of Federal and regional competences have also given rise to a multitude of possibilities for engaging in judicial legal review that can produce significant procedural delays, especially in technically and politically sensitive projects like nuclear installations. It must also be explored how a procedural optimization of these review procedures at both the federal and regional level, such as consolidated hearings, time‑limits, digitalization, harmonization of decision sequences, targeted standing, can accelerate decision‑making without undermining constitutional or EU‑law rights.

The research will therefore present the possibilities of more result‑oriented cooperation agreements, alongside alternative institutional models such as integrated or hybrid permitting structures, joint decision‑making bodies that reconcile divided competences, joint financing arrangements and cross‑border coordination platforms tailored to specific projects (e.g. residual‑heat exchange in the North Sea Port/Borssele context). The ambition is to move beyond abstract constitutional theory and to produce, as far as possible, legally operable texts and institutional designs, at both the internal federal, regional and the cross‑border level, that can be adopted or adapted by legislators and administrations. In doing so, the project supports the development of a stable, legitimate and constitutionally robust governance model that positions Belgium as a coherent and reliable actor in cross‑border nuclear governance.

O3: Developing Cross‑Border Governance for Electricity, Safety, and Residual Heat: Belgium’s geographic and industrial integration with neighboring states necessitates legal solutions for cross‑border nuclear cooperation. This includes electricity trade, joint safety oversight, cross‑border environmental impact assessments, and, emerging as a theme, residual‑heat valorization from foreign nuclear facilities into Belgian industrial clusters. This objective examines which are the current main hurdles and which additional legal, regulatory, and administrative structures are required to make such cooperation possible. The goal is to create clear models that authorities on both sides of the border can use to structure joint projects. An