Following the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March of 2011, Germany made a commitment to shut down all of its nuclear power reactors. Eight of the seventeen nuclear power reactors in Germany have now been shut down and the rest are scheduled to be shut down by 2022. While Germany will no longer be generating electricity from nuclear power after 2022, it will take decades to deal with the legacy of nuclear power in the form of spent nuclear fuel and other radioactive wastes.
For decades, a variety of nuclear wastes have been stored in the old Asse potash mine over fifteen thousand feet beneath the northern Germany state of Lower Saxony. Low to medium level nuclear waste was carelessly dumped in the old mine in the 1960s and 1970s. Following that, the storage was more organized. Most of the waste is from nuclear reactors but there are also some radioactive wastes from hospitals and research facilities. Questions have been raised but not definitively answered about whether there may be high level nuclear waste in the mine. Currently, there are one hundred and twenty-six thousand barrels of radioactive waste stored in the Asse mine.
Potash mining at Asse was shut down in 1965. Until the end of the 1970s, radioactive materials were placed in the mine ostensibly for “research purposes” but the mine was a really repository. The mine has been deteriorating for a long time. About thirty-five hundred gallons of water flow into the tunnels of the mine every day.
In 2010, a decision was made to remove the barrels of waste from the mine. There is a danger that the mine could collapse and allow the radioactive wastes to come into contact with the groundwater in the area. The old shafts and layout of the Asse mine do not meet the current legal standards for storing nuclear materials.
It was estimated that it would cost at least a billion dollars to clean out the mine. However, many experts have expressed doubts that it will be possible to recover all the barrels from the old mine shafts. Germany founded a federal company called Bundesgesellschaft Für Endlagerung (BGE) for radioactive waste disposal in 2016.
Thomas Lautsch is one of the experts at BGE. He told the visiting German Environment Minister Svenja Schulze on a recent tour of the mine, "We would have to build a retrieval mine, which is more than simply just a new shaft. We would also need an interim storage facility for the waste, and we would have to create many new shafts to gain access to the individual chambers. By about 2024, we have to start construction.” He added that he expected the construction phase of the project to take eight or nine years.
In essence, an entirely new mine will have to be developed around the old mine in order to just retrieve the barrels of waste. If everything goes according to plan, removal of the barrels could begin in 2033. Schulze admits that this timeline for removal of the barrels is much longer than desirable. But, she said that safety must be considered as well as speed. It will be revealed over the next few years whether or not a safe and speedy extraction of the barrels of waste at the Asse mine is even possible.