Boom Clay borehole water, home of a diverse bacterial community

For over two decades, Boom Clay has been studied in the framework of geological disposal of nuclear waste thereby mainly addressing its geochemical properties. Today, also the microbiological properties and the possibility of microbes interacting with radionuclides or repository components including the waste form, in a host formation like Boom Clay are considered. In the past, a reference composition for synthetic Boom Clay pore water (BCPW) was derived, based on interstitial water sampled from different layers within the Boom clay. Similarly, the primary aim of this microbiological study was to determine the core BCPW bacterial community and identify representative water samples for future microbial directed lab experiments. In this respect, BCPW was sampled from different Boom Clay layers using the Morpheus piezometer and subsequently analysed by microscopy and molecular techniques, in search for overall shared and abundant micro-organisms.