After the Fukushima disaster, Germany decided to phase out its nuclear plants. All seven plants will be shut down by 2022, but Germany faces the problem common to all decommissions-- where will the waste be stored? There will be 28 million cubic meters of highly radioactive waste that will remain radioactive for a million years. Two thousand containers of waste must be safely buried in locations that are isolated from ground water and seismically stable. Such locations are not common. When the US began developing the Nevada waste storage site at Yucca
Mountain, it found that the salt dome chosen for storage leaked water
and waste located on a seismic fault line. Government officials looking for such a safe place declared Germany a "blank map". Currently radioactive waste is stored above ground near the reactors similar to storage in the United States. This is only a temporary solution since the stored waste is vulnerable to weather, floods, earthquakes and even terrorism. The storage casks are built to hold waste for only a few decades.
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Mulheim-Karlich Nuclear Power Plant
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The high level waste is mostly spent fuel rods. Exposure results in near instantaneous death, as the "liquidators" at Chernobyl found out. They are incredibly hot from nuclear fission and are placed in casks to cool for a few decades. Once cooled the rods can be transported to permanent storage where they emit radioactivity for centuries. Despite not having favorable geology, Germany does not plan to export waste. Former salt mines at Asse and Morsleben were used to store low and medium level waste in the sixties and seventies, but these must be closed at great expense since they fail to meet modern safety standards. Any storage plans must account for the prolonged half lives involved. For example, communication experts must decide how to communicate the danger to generations thousands of years from now, when language will be completely different. Think of Egyptian or Mayan hieroglyphics and you have a grasp of the problem.
Public sentiment towards a storage site nearby is highly adverse. Residents of Gorleben, Lower Saxony, have been fighting for decades to keep a storage site away from their village. The site was a political choice made in 1977 when the region near the former East Germany was sparsely inhabited and economically depressed. Over the years there have been numerous demonstrations, blocking the rail line that brings temporary storage canisters to the site. An exploratory mine was excavated at Gorleben, but was abandoned in light of local opposition. Protestors remain vigilant at Gorleben because the pressure for suitable permanent storage sites builds as nuclear plants around the world near the end of their operational lives.
