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Nuclear waste storage may not be complete until 2080

2021-10-18T14:34:13.302Z


No final repository in sight: radioactive waste will have to remain in German nuclear power plants for decades, estimates the former head of the waste management commission. The dispute over the Asse interim storage facility is also ongoing.


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View of the former Asse salt mine near Wolfenbüttel in Lower Saxony

Photo: epd / IMAGO

The search for a repository for highly radioactive waste from German nuclear power plants is still ongoing.

But even if the federal government decides on a suitable location in the coming years, it will take decades for the storage to be completed.

This is what Michael Sailer, the former head of the federal waste management commission, tells the dpa news agency.

Sailer assumes that the storage of the nuclear waste in the planned repository can only be completed around the year 2080.

That is how long the nuclear waste will have to remain at the sites of the nuclear power plants.

The approved operating time of the 16 interim storage facilities in Germany was presumably exceeded by then.

After the end of the planned repository in Gorleben, Lower Saxony, the federal government has committed itself to the selection of a new location by 2031.

Once this location has been found, according to Sailer, the approval process and the expansion of the warehouse will follow.

The engineer estimates a duration of 20 years for this - accordingly, a repository could not go into trial operation until 2050.

Then it could take about 30 years until all the containers are brought from the interim storage facilities to the repository.

"That means that the storage in the repository will last from 2050 to 2080," said Sailer.

One container per day - with 6000 containers that takes time

That can be calculated: "We will have a total of around 1800 to 1900 castors in the 16 interim storage facilities that have to be brought to the final storage facility," said Sailer.

There, spent fuel elements and vitrified waste would have to be transferred to the final storage containers in a protected facility.

He assumes that one third of the waste in an interim storage container fits into a final storage container.

"So it could be around 6,000 final storage containers."

Realistically, one must assume that due to the high requirements for the safety checks, around one container per day can be stored in the repository.

The Site Selection Act prescribes: The repository must be so safe that people and the environment are protected from radiation for a million years.

The duration of the whole process could create a new problem: the interim storage facilities of the nuclear power plants were only set up for an operating period of 40 years.

“We have no empirical values ​​beyond these 40 years, and there is actually no way of calculating in advance,” said Sailer.

He calls on the federal government to deal with this problem at an early stage.

"It would be fatal if research and considerations on interim storage were not started until 2040."

The BGZ Gesellschaft für Zwischenlagerung offers an overview of the interim storage facilities in Germany.

Sailer headed the Federal Waste Management Commission until 2019. Since then, geoscientist Barbara Reichert has been chairwoman of the commission.

The situation in the planned Asse interim storage facility remains unclear

A planned interim storage facility that has been causing controversy for years is the storage facility on the Asse in the Wolfenbüttel district of Lower Saxony. On Monday, a group of experts published a final report of around 100 pages. With this report, the decision for an interim storage facility should be re-examined. The result: Legally, the responsible federal company made no mistakes. How it will continue is still unclear.

In the “Asse II mine”, a former mine, there are around 126,000 barrels with low and medium level radioactive waste in 13 chambers. The nuclear waste was stored from 1967 to 1978, with a stipulated retrieval. Because water seeps in, the warehouse has to be cleared. The waste must then first be stored temporarily until final storage is possible.

The Federal Agency for Final Storage (BGE) had already decided on a location near the Asse ridge as an interim storage facility in 2020.

This decision had triggered fierce criticism, especially in the affected region.

In February 2021, members of the Asse-2 support group and representatives of the Federal Environment Ministry, the Lower Saxony Ministry for the Environment, Energy, Building and Climate Protection and the BGE agreed to review the location decision.

The expert report is to be analyzed and evaluated by all those involved; further steps are due in November.

vki / dpa

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2021-10-18

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