German industry pushing for nuclear waste dump

German industry pushing for final nuclear waste dump

by Diet Simon

The German government, industry and anti-nuclear activists are arguing publicly again about final storage of nuclear waste.

Industry wants a salt deposit experts condemn as unsafe. The activists want it scrapped altogether. And the environment minister is promising examination of three new sites but hasn’t moved on that in six years.

The president of the federation of industry, BDI, Michael Rogowski, has criticised
the plans of environment minister, Jürgen Trittin (Greens), to start a fresh
search for one storage for waste of varying radioactive intensities.

This would delay the choice for years, Rogowski says. There is no reason, he argues, to start from scratch after more than 40 years of searching for and examining a final depot.

Rogowski told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper, “It is economically and ecologically irresponsible to put off the safe storage of radioactive material forever and a day.”

Trittin has announced he would table a bill before the end of this year to provide for a search. Such a law was promised in the early days of the Social Democrat-Greens coalition.

In the first lawmaking period the government stopped exploration of a salt deposit at Gorleben, east of Hanover in Lower Saxony, and promised a new search to the anti-nuclear activists in the area. Several alternative sites are to be investigated.

But since Red-Green took office in 1998 there has been no movement on the pledge. The Federal Audits Office has admonished Trittin for this several times.

Rogowski maintains that all technical issues of final storage have been clarified. "The Konrad Mine has been licensed for years for medium and low radioactive wastes, the Gorleben salt deposit is suitable for final storage of high-radioactive wastes.”

Even if the search of several years proposed by Trittin were to find locations for the one-for-all final depot, says Grobowski, it would have to be examined at high cost over a long time. It would take many years, if not decades, to gain the same level of findings as for Gorleben, he says.

Trittin has announced that at least three locations are should be examined in a “fair procedure open to any result”.

Industry complains that with this the government is risking financial burdens running to billions for enterprises and public budgets.

Without any compulsion, the minister would raise the cost of producing electricity in German yet again, Rogowski argues, pushing Germany into international isolation on the final storage issue.

No other country was trying to keep wastes of varying radioactive intensities in just one depot, he claimed.

“After six years of delays by the government it is now time to make decisions on final storage.” Rogowski demanded that the government end its moratorium on exploring the Gorleben salt deposit and make preparations for its use. Preparations for using the Konrad mine should also be speeded up to have it ready by 2010.

“Schacht Konrad” is an abandoned salt mine near Salzgitter in lower Saxony and nuclear dumping plans are also fought there vigorously by local activists.

Salt deposits like the one in Gorleben are unsuitable for storing nuclear waste, say experts. Geophysicist Nikolai Gestermann explained to the “Berliner Zeitung” newspaper that because salt is lighter than the sand and clay layers above it, it presses upwards - comparable to an air bubble in honey.

“In my view a salt deposit is therefore unsuitable for an atomic waste repository” that has to be safe for hundreds of thousands of years.

Anti-nuclear activists allege that German federal and regional governments and the nuclear industry are planning to use the Gorleben salt deposit as a final dump regardless, although exploratory mining of it has been stopped after scientific advice.

Earlier studies showed the Gorleben salt plug to have contact with ground water, posing the danger of contaminating drinking water supplies if nuclear waste is put into it. The activists say every waste consignment into the “interim storage” hall in Gorleben, where the waste is to stay for 40 years, makes permanent storage in the http://www.berlinonline.de/berliner-zeitung/...
salt more likely.

Meanwhile the anti-nuclear activists in Gorleben are taking environment minister Trittin at his word in calling the Gorleben exploratory salt mine “an illegal construction”. They have filed a lawsuit to have it dismantled.

The Bürgerinitiative Umweltschutz Lüchow-Dannenberg has filed a complaint against the Federal Office for Radiation Protection, BfS, to initiate action by the state attorney.

The supposedly exploratory mine in the salt was built bigger than necessary and was practically ready for final nuclear was storage, said the group’s spokesman, Wolfgang Ehmke.

An example was the shaft width. Four metres would have done for exploration, but the “final width” of 7.5 metres had been chosen. All in all the construction violated the atomic energy law because an atomic installation had been built without an atomic licensing procedure, Ehmke said.

Ehmke recalled that the environment minister himself had called the project an “illegal construction” because it went ahead without atomic licensing. But it was worrying, Ehmke added, that Trittin was now intending to give the task of finding a new final storage location to those who had financed the illegal Gorleben project.

“An illegal construction has to be closed down and torn down,” Ehmke said, and the same had to apply to the supposed exploratory mine.
The dispute follows shortly after the transportation of 12 more Castor caskets of nuclear waste into a prefabricated hall near Gorleben for “interim storage”.
The train that brought it from a plutonium plant in northern France killed 21-year-old Sébastien Briat who tried to stop it in Alsace. Next Wednesday another nuclear waste train is to run thousands of kilometres from north Germany to north France, through densely populated areas most of the way.
In the Lower Saxony state parliament, Stefan Wenzel, head of The Greens group, accused premier Christian Wulff, of the conservative CDU, of trying to establish facts on the ground in Gorleben without wanting to wait for further examination of the salt.

He said 1.4 billion euros had been spent on the mine so far. At the same time, Wenzel alleged, Wulff was serving up the Konrad mine to the nuclear industry on a silver platter while the final storage issue remained unresolved.

Wenzel also accused the government in Hanover of wanting to build more atomic power stations. "That’s not on the agenda,” responded a CDU politician. But Anneliese Zachow claimed that new power stations were urgently needed.

The Lower Saxony environment minister, Hans-Heinrich Sander, if the Liberal FDP, accused The Greens of playing on people’s fears.

The conservative newspaper Die Welt claims that a survey has found 52% of Germans wanting their power produced by a mixture of fossil, renewable and nuclear sources.