Nuclear power in Europe

GERMANY: With a return to nuclear power set to be a key election topic next year, a leaking waste site has refocused attention on safety, writes Derek Scally .

ST BARBARA has learned to be flexible in her job description.

For 40 years, a statue of the patron saint of miners has watched from an illuminated shrine in the wall of the Konrad mine shaft, one kilometre underground near the German city of Braunschweig.

The credibility of the nuclear industry was shaken last night after the estimated cost of cleaning up Britain's atomic waste was raised by a further £10bn.

The latest clean-up estimate from the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) suggests the commonly accepted figure of £73bn should rise to £83bn. But the agency insisted that £10bn of income from generating and fuel reprocessing plants should also be taken into account.

BERLIN, July 8 (IPS) - Confirmation that radioactive brine has been leaking for two decades from a German underground deposit for nuclear waste is yet another blow to the idea that nuclear power can safely increase electricity generation and simultaneously reduce emissions.

Radioactive leaks from the nuclear waste deposit Asse II near Braunschweig in Lower Saxony, some 225 km southwest of Berlin, were first discovered in 1988. The state-owned Helmholtz Institute for
Scientific Research, which operates the centre, officially admitted the leaks only Jun. 16, under pressure from the German press.

America's landfills for low-level nuclear waste should be conserved for America's waste, according to a new, bipartisan bill to be introduced next week in the U.S. Senate.

The bill targets efforts by Salt Lake City-based EnergySolutions to use its Tooele County landfill for contaminated cleanup waste from Italy's defunct nuclear reactors and maybe other foreign waste in the future. And it echoes a bill proposed in the House of Representatives by U.S. Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, and two colleagues.