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Time for Burial: Last Repository for Nuclear Waste, Germany

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Germany published on September 28, 2020 a list of potential storage sites for radioactive waste as part of its plans to exit nuclear power, dropping the Gorleben salt dome in Lower Saxony from the running.  The 444-page list of sites, to be assessed by 2031 for use from 2050 to hold waste currently in interim storage at nuclear plants, was published by Germany’s Federal Agency for Final Storage (BGE).  Some 90 locations, including parts of Lower Saxony, Bavaria, Baden Wuerttemberg and eastern German states, have been found to be potentially suitable after BGE undertook preliminary mapping that revealed 54% of German territory could be satisfactory.

Taking three years, the process identified salt, clay and crystalline, above all granite, formations, stressing the criteria were science-based, without political influence.  No location was predetermined, said Stefan Studt, head of BGE’s managing board, at a news conference. “Any region in today’s list would take a long, long time to become the actual final space,” he said. Germany had been on a course to exit nuclear power since 2000 but hastened the plan, now set for 2022, following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011.

Gorleben, which became the focus of anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s, failed on three points related to retention, hydrochemical and overall geological qualities, so that it could not be ruled out that aquifers may come into contact with salt, said Steffen Kanitz, a BGE board member.

Germany publishes nuclear storage list, Gorleben dropped

Mismanaging Nuclear Waste – Germany

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Inspectors in northern Germany have found that a third of barrels containing radioactive waste at a decommissioned nuclear plant are damaged, the Schleswig-Holstein Environment Ministry said on Thursday.  Vattenfall, the energy company which manages the Brunsbüttel site in Schlewswig-Holstein, reported that 102 of the 335 barrels stored in the site’s six underground chambers were corroded, leaking or had loose lids.  Some of the containers are so deformed that they can no longer be moved, as they no longer fit into the robotic gripping arms installed at the site, the inspectors reported.  “The chambers are secure and there is no danger for the personnel or the local population,” Vattenfall said in a statement released on Thursday,

The Brunsbüttel site harbours 631 barrels of nuclear waste in its six chambers, which have been used for storing waste since 1979. The nuclear power plant was decommissioned in 2011.  The barrels contain resin used for water filters, residue from contaminated water and various other types of waste.

So far, Vattenfall has only inspected four of the six chambers using remote cameras.  The chambers themselves are built from concrete and have walls over a metre thick to prevent radiation escaping into the surrounding environment.  The energy company has sent a proposal to the Schlewsig-Holstein Environment Ministry for making the storage facility more secure, including by installing dehumidifiers to slow corrosion, which has yet to be approved by government experts.  “The chambers [at Brunsbüttel] were supposed to be a temporary storage facility,” Vattenfall said in a statement on Thursday. “They weren’t designed to for long-term containment.”

It was originally planned to store the barrels at Brunsbüttel until they were moved to the ‘Konrad’ mine shaft site in Lower Saxony.This permanent storage facility was to be completed by the mid- to late 90s, but has been subject to successive delays. Completion dates in 2014 has been missed and a target of 2019 is also unlikely.  The latest estimate for completion is the start of the next decade.

One in three nuclear waste barrels damaged, The Local Germany, Oct. 10, 2014