German nuclear programme threatened by old mine housing waste

Roger Boyes in Berlin

A leaky salt mine used as a radioactive dump is jeopardising Germany’s plans to cling on to nuclear power despite fierce political opposition.
About 750m (2,500ft) below the surface, in the disused Asse mine in Lower Saxony, lie 126,000 containers of atomic waste — containers that are rusting. The canisters, said to contain low-grade radioactive waste from research reactors, were buried between 1967 and 1978.
Nuclear power stations also disposed of their waste in the mine and for political reasons the inventory was kept deliberately vague.
It is believed that at least 100 tonnes of uranium is in the shaft, as well as 87 tonnes of thorium and 25kg of plutonium. Water is leaking into the chambers at a rate of 12,000 litres a day and geologists warn that the old mine could collapse.

“We just don’t know the state of the buried waste,” Wolfram König, head of the Federal Agency for Radiation Safety, said. “There’s no way of working out exactly what’s down there. It has to be brought to the surface.”
The discovery of the dilapidated conditions in Asse is a setback for the German Government, which is trying to extend the lifespan of power stations.
Although a previous Social Democrat-Green government pushed through legislation for a phased withdrawal from nuclear energy it is back on the agenda as a way of reducing dependence on Russian gas and cutting carbon dioxide emissions.
It is on the same track as much of Europe. Italy signalled this week that it would resume its reactor building programme. The number of nuclear reactors is expected to grow from 435 in 31 countries today to 568 in 42 countries by 2020.
The decision by Britain to send waste to Germany has served as a reminder that the Germans have not solved the problem of how and where to store it. This uncertainty, and news of the mine in Saxony, is stoking the embers of the anti-nuclear movement — demonstrations are planned for this weekend — and reviving it as a political force.
“I’m angry that the final disposal of nuclear waste is being decided on political criteria rather than on the basis of geological safety and suitability,” said Andreas Blechner, a senior union official at the Volkswagen works in Salzgitter. He is a leader of the movement against the transfer of the canisters from Asse to another old mine, Schacht Konrad, which is close to the VW factory.
Most of Germany’s nuclear waste storage has been concentrated in Gorleben, Lower Saxony, and that is where the Sellafield containers from Britain will go.
Gorleben is the focus of the anti-nuclear movement, which has tried to derail train transports of waste and to destroy or block the approach roads to the two above-ground storage units. They house 3,500 steel, cast-iron and concrete containers of radioactive sludge and thousands of tonnes of spent fuel rods.
German nuclear storage centres were designed in an era when safety standards were less demanding. All the sites are in Lower Saxony, often geologically unsuited but close — until the fall of communism — to the East German border. Land was cheap there and the area was depopulated.
Even though Germany is supposed to be winding down its atomic programme, its reactors consume about 400 tonnes of nuclear fuel a year.
If the phase-out continues, at least 17,200 tonnes of spent fuel rods will have to be disposed of, along with irradiated pipes and filters of decomissioned plants and the 43 containers of radioactive waste from Britain and France.
Norbert Röttgen, the Environment Minister, is due to submit a Bill in March outlining plans for a permanent storage site. Some political commentators bet that Germany will end up investing in a heavily policed, Western-quality storage centre somewhere in the east of Siberia — far, far away.