Some 800m below the town of Gorleben, northern Germany, salt glistens like ice underfoot.
The man in charge of the nation’s nuclear waste is walking through caverns carved into a huge salt formation that could one day entomb 17,000 tonnes of highly radioactive detritus.
DANNENBERG, Germany -- A shipment of nuclear waste from France reached a storage facility in northwestern Germany on Tuesday after police worked through the night to clear a road blockade by over 3,000 protesters.
For nearly four days, anti-nuclear protesters have rappelled from bridges, undermined roads, and formed human shields across the shipment's route in an attempt to slow it down. A shepherdess even herded 500 sheep and some 60 goats across the road Monday between Dannenberg - where the shipment was offloaded from train cars onto trucks - and Gorleben in a bid to slow it down.
The German government is to investigate whether a temporary nuclear waste storage site in the town of Gorleben could be turned into a permanent facility. The review, due to start in October, may be overseen by private bodies.
BERLIN (AP) — Almost 15,000 anti-nuclear demonstrators protested Saturday against a shipment of reprocessed nuclear waste being transported to a storage site in northern Germany, police said.
German police were working to free three demonstrators who had chained themselves to railway tracks near the western city of Woerth, preventing the shipment from crossing from France into Germany.
BERLIN: Some 500 students demonstrated Friday against the disposal of reprocessed nuclear waste at a temporary storage center in northwest Germany, police said.
A train carrying the waste was due to leave France Friday, with trucks taking it the final miles (kilometers) to the storage facility near the town of Gorleben early Monday.
Germany's environment minister made himself out to be a crisis manager in the scandal surrounding the Asse nuclear waste storage facility. But the problem has not been solved -- and the issue threatens to derail the CDU’s plans to postpone Germany's nuclear phaseout.
A report published in Germany's Focus magazine alleges that authorities in the state of Lower Saxony were aware of safety issues at the Asse II atomic storage facility 15 years ago.
The Focus report says the state government, led by the Social Democratic Party (SPD) at the time, commissioned a technical report on potential hazards at the converted salt mine in 1991.
Aug. 5 (Bloomberg) -- The German government should abandon its planned phase-out of nuclear energy to help rein in surging electricity prices and protect the environment, according to proposals drawn up by an energy taskforce under Economy Minister Michael Glos.
The plan, in the form of a three-page draft of ''key points'' toward a nuclear-energy law, urges the government to extend the running of nuclear reactors to at least 40 years from a maximum 32 years at present, Berlin-based ministry spokeswoman Charlotte Lauer said today by phone. It is a recommendation only and hasn't been endorsed by Glos, Lauer said.
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.
Sealing radioactive waste at an underground disposal site in Asse, Germany, by flooding is the cheapest of several waste management options but would produce dangerous amounts of radioactive methane in
groundwater within 150-750 years, according to a forthcoming report from the German radiation protection agency (BfS). The findings are significant because the site, an ex-salt mine containing nuclear research waste, is geologically similar to the planned long-term disposal site at Gorleben. The report could influence calculations of nuclear waste disposal costs.
