Knowledge Newsletter

Secret information about a new nuclear reactor

The Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport has been refusing to make a single document public about the construction of a new nuclear reactor in the North Holland dunes for months. VWS even pays penalty payments to keep breaking the law. Why is that?

• Stefan Vermeulen

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One document. We want one document with NRC would like to see it by invoking the Open Government Act (Woo), but the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport (VWS) refuses to give it. The ministry even pays an increasing penalty payment for not revealing this one document.

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It's all about building a new nuclear reactor in the dunes near Petten, in North Holland. This reactor, 'Pallas', should produce medical isotopes on a large scale that are used to detect and treat cancer. Initially, the thing should have been there in 2015. At the beginning of this year, together with my colleague Derk Stokmans, I investigated why Pallas was still not there, even though the cost of the project for the State had risen from 40 million to 2.4 billion euros. We asked ourselves: can the Netherlands actually build a new nuclear reactor?

Improvement plan

Our story, headlined “Drama in the Dunes”, was written in early February in the newspaper. A lot appeared to go wrong with the project — which finances and manages the Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. In March, then VWS minister Fleur Agema (PVV) reported to the House of Representatives that hard work was being done to improve management. This would be evident from a so-called Gate Review (where external experts see how a project is going) and an “Improvement Plan” that has now been drawn up, she wrote the Kamer.With an appeal to the Woo — a law that makes it possible to request information from the government and prescribes that everyone has a right to it — we requested both documents. Not a complicated request: it involved just two documents, which were already on the minister's desk. But instead of the requested documents, we received a series of rejections:

• VWS first asked for a delay because our request would be “complex and extensive”;
• When we went to court to enforce a decision on our WOO request, VWS said that the documents would be “still in process” and could therefore not be made public;
• After coming out of a Letter to Parliament in July, it turned out that the documents were not being edited at all, the Amsterdam court and NRC apologies from VWS. The Gate Review was made public; according to the ministry, the Improvement Plan for the Pallas project would follow at the end of August;
• At the end of September, the Improvement Plan was not yet in place, and the judge gave VWS another two weeks to make a decision.

Frequent offender

Even after that, the ministry did not decide on our WOO request, so the Improvement Plan is still not public. Since October 14, VWS - as long as it does not make a decision - has been paying a penalty payment of 100 euros per day, an account that can amount to a maximum of 15,000 euros.VWS has often refused to reveal information that the outside world was entitled to, it is even a repeat offender in this area (just like the Ministry of Agriculture by the way) In January 2022, the judge ruled that the ministry should make chat traffic about the much-discussed “face mask deal” with Sywert van Lienden public after a request from de Volkskrant, but those pieces didn't come. Not until December 2022, well after de Volkskrant had gone to court for the second time, hundreds of pages of internal communication were publicizedIn April 2023 ruled the Advisory Board on Public Access and Information Management (ACOI) — an advisory body set up by the government to promote the application of the Woo — in a report that VWS was “slow” and “unresponsive” to Woo requests. For example, the ministry refused to provide research platform Follow the Money information about vaccination policy during corona.

Goat trails

“The famous goat trails are walked so as not to give certain pieces. This attitude must change. Openness is the norm, that is the starting point of the law”, said ACOI chairman Ineke van Gent at the time. That call seems to have had little effect. Former VWS Minister Ernst Kuipers (D66) made the recommendations of the ACOI sit side by side. In November 2023, it turned out that research of de Volkskrant We have noticed in recent months after our request for information about Pallas that VWS was still systematically violating the Woo by not disclosing concepts of internal documents when asked for werd.Dat. What could be included in that Improvement Plan anyway?

How do you look at how the government deals with the Woo? Is more transparency desirable, or do journalists and citizens expect too much from the speed at which governments can disclose information? Let me know: stefan.vermeulen@nrc.nl