Nuclear power | Five federal states are out of the search for a final storage facility

The nuclear waste stored in these castors also has to wait quite a while before it is finally disposed of. Photo: dpa/Guido Kirchner “We are really well on schedule,” says Iris Graffunder. "There are no more gray areas, everything is categorized." On Tuesday, the managing director of the Federal Society for Final Storage (BGE) presented a new status in the search for a final repository for the highly radioactive waste generated in Germany. And an interactive map of the Federal Republic, on which different colors mark the potential suitability for final storage of the area in question: Orange stands for unsuitable, yellow for less suitable, the green areas are okay, but not optimal, the turquoise areas have been identified by the BGE as the best so far, so they will be further examined.  

Last year, 90 sub-areas on around 25 percent of the area were still in the search process. Now 36 sub-areas remain, which together make up almost five percent of Germany's area. In 2027, the BGE wants to name “one to two handfuls” of location regions that will then be examined in more detail. The Bundestag must agree to this proposal. Graffunder expects a final decision on the final repository location to be made by the middle of this century at the latest. The site selection law states 2031 as the deadline. Most recently, some experts assumed that the search could drag on until the 2070s.

Granite and clay formations as well as salt domes can be considered as so-called host rocks for the final repository. The future deposit should be at least 300 meters underground and surrounded by a layer of rock at least 100 meters thick as a barrier. This is intended to ensure the safest possible storage of radioactive waste for at least a million years.

»It's all categorized.«

According to the interactive map, eleven of the 16 federal states still identify potentially suitable areas. In Lower Saxony, areas in particular in the Hanover region, in the districts of Peine, Schaumburg and Osnabrück as well as in Emsland and the Harz remain in the process. In Bavaria, which has so far vehemently rejected the construction of a final repository on its territory, part of the Bavarian Forest is colored turquoise. In Baden-Württemberg it is the Black Forest. Areas in the states of Bremen and Hamburg are also still being examined. Berlin, Hesse and Saxony are currently no longer in the search process. Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland had already been eliminated earlier.

The operation of nuclear power plants in Germany resulted in around 28,000 cubic meters of highly radioactive nuclear waste. This corresponds to 10,500 tons of heavy metal, which were or will be packed in around 1,900 Castor containers. This waste includes the spent fuel elements from nuclear power plants as well as the reprocessing residue melted into glass. Although the highly radioactive parts only make up around five to ten percent of the total volume of all radioactive waste in the Federal Republic, they contain more than 99 percent of the radioactivity.

The salt dome in Gorleben, which was the only site examined for decades, was eliminated from the process in 2020 - it is geologically unsuitable, which critics had repeatedly pointed out beforehand: The rock above the salt dome does not have sufficient strength to safely prevent the escape of radioactivity over the required period of one million years. There are also indications that groundwater could come into contact with the salt dome and thus with the stored waste.

The highly radioactive nuclear waste is currently stored in 16 interim storage facilities. Most are located at the sites of decommissioned nuclear power plants. Three others - Gorleben in Lower Saxony, Ahaus in North Rhine-Westphalia and Lubmin in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania - are so-called central interim storage facilities. In Jülich, North Rhine-Westphalia, waste from the operation of a research reactor is stored. The interim storage facilities were approved for a period of 40 years. Because the search for a final repository takes longer, they have to be operated for much longer.

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