Enlarge image
Recycling of nuclear waste in La Hague, France (archive image)
Photo: Francois Mori / AP
The large German energy companies have signed a billion-dollar contract with France to return the remaining nuclear waste to Germany.
According to the mostly state-owned French nuclear company Orano, the fuel rods will be returned to the Federal Republic from the La Hague reprocessing plant in northern France by the end of 2024.
The contract is said to have a volume of more than one billion euros.
The agreement with the groups PreussenElektra, RWE, EnBW and Vattenfall concerns the return of "all German nuclear waste that is still stored in the Orano plant in La Hague," the French group announced.
This implements an agreement in principle between the German and French governments in June.
The return is therefore faster than expected.
In mid-2020, the federal government had expected that in the worst case scenario, the material would not be completely transferred to the Ahaus interim storage facility until the "mid-1940s".
At that time, the year 2047 was mentioned internally.
The waste of medium radioactivity is the last to be brought back to Germany from recycling from La Hague.
The German energy companies had 5310 tons of nuclear waste recycled in France.
"More than 97 percent of the radioactive material has already been returned," said Orano.
The residual nuclear waste is highly active waste that contains most of the radioactivity.
Environmental protection groups such as Greenpeace call the term reprocessing »misleading«, since only a few percent of the nuclear waste is reused in new fuel rods.
The highly radiating garbage has to be stored temporarily until a repository is available.
Germany intends to complete the phase-out of nuclear power in the coming year.
But a repository has still not been found.
ssu / AFP