Search for a final storage facility: Five federal states are out

At the Federal Company for Final Storage (BGE) they are satisfied with their own work. “We are really well on schedule,” says Iris Graffunder. “There are no more gray areas, everything is categorized.” On Tuesday, the BGE managing director explained how the search for a final repository for the highly radioactive waste generated in Germany is progressing - and presented an interactive map of the Federal Republic on which different colors mark the potential suitability of the respective area for final storage: orange stands for unsuitable, yellow for less suitable, the green areas are okay, but not optimal, the turquoise ones have been identified by the BGE as the best geologically so far. Only the latter will therefore be examined further.

They are spread across 36 so-called sub-areas, which together make up almost 5 percent of Germany's area. Last year, 90 sub-areas on around 25 percent of the area were still in the search process. In 2027, the BGE wants to distill “one to two handfuls” of location regions from the sub-areas, which will then initially be examined in detail above ground – i.e. above ground. The Bundestag must agree to this proposal.

Graffunder expects a final decision on the final repository location to be made by the middle of the century at the latest. The site selection law states 2031 as the deadline. Recently, however, 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. The radioactive waste should be stored there as safely as possible for at least a million years.

According to the current map, 11 of the 16 federal states still identify potentially suitable sub-areas. In Lower Saxony, which is already burdened by the planned or damaged Konrad and Asse nuclear storage facilities, areas in the Hanover region, in the Peine, Schaumburg and Osnabrück districts 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, and areas in the states of Bremen and Hamburg are also being further 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 that were or will be packed in around 1,900 Castor containers. The high-level waste consists of spent fuel from nuclear power plants as well as reprocessing residue melted into glass. Although the highly radioactive parts only make up around 5 to 10 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 withdrawn from the process in 2020 - due to geological deficiencies that critics had repeatedly pointed out beforehand: the rock above the salt dome is not sufficiently strong 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. 12 of these camps 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.