On 4 June 2020, the Advisory Panel of Experts recommended to the Director of SÚRAO to reduce the number of potential DGR candidate sites to four (Janoch – Temelín jih, Horka, Hrádek, Březový potok). If the recommendation of the Advisory Panel is adopted by the Council of SÚRAO, this recommendation will be forwarded to the Ministry of the Industry and Trade of the Czech Republic and subsequently to the Government of the Czech Republic for approval. The representative of the SÚJB participated as an observer at the work of the Advisory Panel in accordance with the Agreement on the Cooperation in the Development of Deep Geological Repository.
The SÚJB observer, in accordance with the Statute of the Advisory Panel, did not have the right to vote and was not directly involved in the site evaluation process. However, as early as 2018, the SÚJB gave detailed comments on nine Studies of Initial Safety Report, which served the Advisory Panel as one of the references for the preparation of its final report. The final report of the Advisory Panel confirmed the results of Studies’ analysis and noted, that one of the original nine sites, namely Kraví hora, conflicts with some of the site selecting criteria under Decree No. 378/2016 Coll. Of the remaining eight sites, the Advisory Panel has now selected four on which it has proposed to carry out further work. The SÚJB has no further comment on these results and confirms that the Advisory Panel's work was carried out objectively, transparently and impartially. A high level of professional work has been achieved on the basis of available data from all nine sites.
The narrowing of the number of potential sites to four, approximately 30 years after the start of the DGR project in the Czech Republic, is the first significant milestone approaching the start of the DGR operation in 2065.