In 2021, BASE headed a short workshop called “What do we need to do to trust in models?” at the first edition of the safeND symposium conference (safeND: "Safety of Nuclear Waste Diposal“; Kock et al. 2021). Because of the broad interest people showed in the topic, three consecutive workshops on the topic of “Trust in Models” (TiM) were held between 2022 and 2025.  In this Open Letter, we will present the main points of discussion.

Knowledge of how gas moves through clay-rich rocks and barrier systems in a radioactive waste disposal facility is important to give confidence to long-term containment of waste. The GT experiment was designed to determine the physics driving gas movement in Opalinus Clay, the candidate host rock in Switzerland. The way gas moved through the rock was seen to change based on the rate of gas pressurisation rate – by analogy, the rate of gas production in a geological disposal facility.

This abstract describes the scope and the layout of workshop W08 on Uranium mining – lessons to learn for waste disposal in view of participation and safety.

This workshop aims to bring together experts in both fundamental research on radionuclide chemistry and mobility and its applications to repository safety. It intends to facilitate knowledge exchange between the two fields, promoting more coordinated and goal-oriented safety research.

In this project, an assessment tool is developed to evaluate the applicability of AI methods in geosciences with respect to key geological activities in the site selection process. The results show that AI should not have any decision-making power when used in the site selection process. It is strongly recommended that all methods should be evaluated and validated iteratively and that the results should be made publicly available when applied to the key activities of the site selection process.