Qualla: Doel Nuclear Power Station

Doel Nuclear Power Station: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ad Meskens, CC BY-SA 3.0. Nine million people live within seventy-five kilometres of the cooling towers. That figure, recorded in a 2011 Nature commentary on European reactor siting, made Doel the most densely encircled nuclear power station in Europe and probably the world. The towers themselves rise 169 metres above the left bank of the Scheldt, big enough to be visible from the Dutch provinces of Zeeland and western North Brabant, big enough to host a nesting pair of peregrine falcons that have returned every spring since 1996. Beside them sits the village of Doel, which gives the plant its name, and which has been slowly torn down around the people who refused to leave.

Image: Ad Meskens | CC BY-SA 3.0

Doel Nuclear Power Station: Four Reactors on a Crowded Bank

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alexandre Jacquemin, CC BY-SA 3.0. Doel 1 and Doel 2 came online in 1975, twin pressurised-water units built by the ACEC-Cockerill-Westinghouse consortium that anchored Belgian heavy industry in the postwar decades. Doel 3 followed in 1982, Doel 4 in 1985, and earthworks for a fifth, larger reactor were halted in ...

Image: Alexandre Jacquemin | CC BY-SA 3.0

Doel Nuclear Power Station: The Village That Was Supposed to Disappear

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trougnouf, CC BY 4.0. Doel the village is older than Doel the power station by several centuries, a polder settlement of brick houses and dykes and a single church spire. In 1999 the Flemish government decided that the Port of Antwerp needed to expand westward across the Scheldt, and that the village ...

Image: Trougnouf | CC BY 4.0

Doel Nuclear Power Station: Cracks, Sabotage, and the Politics of Aging

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Roxanne King, CC BY 2.0. Doel has had its share of difficult years. In 2012, ultrasound inspections of Doel 3 revealed thousands of tiny cracks in the lowest forged ring of the reactor pressure vessel, traced to a manufacturing defect from the 1970s. The reactor sat dark for a year while regulators debat...

Image: Roxanne King | CC BY 2.0

Doel Nuclear Power Station: The Long Goodbye, Postponed

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean-Pol GRANDMONT, CC BY-SA 3.0. Belgium legislated a nuclear phase-out in 2003 and has been rearranging the deadlines ever since. Doel 1 and Doel 2 were supposed to close in 2015; they ran for another decade and finally shut down on 14 February 2025. Doel 3 had already gone dark in 2022. That leaves Doel 4, lic...

Image: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT | CC BY-SA 3.0