The Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal (Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung – BGE) has the task of searching Germany’s subsurface for the best-suited location in terms of safety requirements for a deep geological repository for high-level radioactive waste. In this role and during the current phase of the Site Selection Procedure, BGE is in charge of collecting and interpreting data from existing sources. In this contribution, we focus on the process of collecting, digitalizing, and providing geological data for the evaluation process.
Past data collection efforts have shown that important data frequently only exists on paper and is distributed over various physical locations in the archives of state geological surveys or companies from related industries. Therefore, since 2019, BGE has been scanning and digitalizing significant numbers of data files with support from contractors.
BGE’s own data management team focusses on collecting relevant data, documenting incoming files, and providing homogenized compilations to the site-evaluation teams. The aim is to provide a comprehensive and easy-to-use data basis for the Site Selection Procedure. This final provision step is particularly challenging with regard to the large number of data sources with varying data formats. Current solutions are based around custom in-house software for the identification of well locations, associated documentation, and GIS plugins, e.g., for spatially informed browsing of incoming file metadata. Finally, BGE will present the main decisions towards the identification of siting regions for surface-based exploration in a way that is both understandable and traceable to the public via a web interface.