Task of Decommissioning Plants Is Herculean
The
dismantling of Germany's nuclear power plants will be one of the
greatest tasks of the century as the country moves to phase out
atomic energy. It will take at least until 2080 to complete the job.
But what happens if energy utility companies who own the facilities
go bust before the work is done?
By
Gerald Traufetter
10 May, 2013
When
politicians put far too much pathos into their speeches, people
should be on their guard -- with a notable exception. There is one
issue where no comparison is overinflated and no superlative appears
exaggerated: Winfried Kretschmann, for instance -- the governor of
the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg and a member of
Germany's Green Party -- spoke of "theological timeframes"
that now need to be decided upon.
His
counterpart from Lower Saxony, Stephan Weil of the center-left Social
Democratic Party (SPD), refers to a different time horizon for his
actions: the Schöningen Spears, a number of 300,000-year-old
Paleolithic hunting weapons that archaeologists found in his home
state. And the co-floor leader of the Green Party in the German
parliament, Jürgen Trittin, reminded his fellow politicians that
this was about "finding a site for the most dangerous waste that
mankind has ever produced."
The
'Last Contentious Issue in Peaceful Nuclear Energy'
The
issue is nuclear waste and its safe disposal. Germany will have to
build a storage facility deep underground that can survive the
ravages of wars, revolutions and even another ice age. Indeed, the
remains of the nuclear age will have to be kept in a final repository
for 1 million years -- longer than the human race has existed.
That
is, at least, the aim of the draft legislation that prompted such
reverential rhetoric from politicians in the opposition and the
government when it was presented last month in Berlin. Under the
direction of German Environment Minister Peter Altmaier, a member of
Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union
(CDU), the bill lays out a plan for determining the location of a
final repository for the highly radioactive waste from Germany's
nuclear power plants. Currently, politicians are still haggling over
the details of the proposed law, which Altmaier says will remove "the
last contentious issue surrounding the peaceful use of nuclear
energy."
What
the representatives of the people would rather not talk about,
though, is the decommissioning of Germany's nuclear power plants.
They were once the cathedrals of industrial progress. But now their
cooling towers and domes have become widely visible symbols of human
folly.
According
to the latest calculations by the German Environment Ministry, the
operation and decommissioning of the country's reactors will produce
173,442 cubic meters (over 6.1 million cubic feet) of low to
medium-level radioactive waste that has to be stored underground. On
top of that, there are 107,430 cubic meters of radioactive detritus
from government institutions.
It's
a monumental task that the Germans won't complete until 2080 "at
the earliest," says nuclear expert Michael Sailer from the
Öko-Institut, a non-profit research and consulting association for
sustainable technology in Berlin. "After all, these are
conservative estimates without any leeway for setbacks."
No
Smooth Sailing
But
it doesn't look as if things will go smoothly. On the contrary, the
phasing out of nuclear power is accompanied by the agonizing
challenge of decommissioning existing reactors: Eight nuclear power
plants that were rapidly taken offline at the behest of the German
government in the wake of Japan's Fukushima disaster have to be
dismantled concurrently, followed by an additional nine facilities by
the end of 2022.
There
is still no roadmap for the decommissioning. To make matters worse,
critics say that they see initial indications of eroding safety
standards for decommissioning licenses as authorities struggle to
cope with the mountains of nuclear waste.
Two
locations are planned for the final storage. Environment Minister
Altmaier's proposed legislation calls for a deep geological
repository for highly radioactive waste to be located by the year
2031. For a long time, the salt dome in Gorleben in the western state
of Lower Saxony was designated for this purpose, but that
controversial plan has been scrapped and the search must now begin
anew.
The
Konrad mining shaft, an old iron ore mine near the central German
town of Salzgitter in the same state, has been selected for storage
of low to medium-level radioactive rubble from decommissioned
reactors and is currently under development. The startup date
recently had to be postponed from 2019 to 2021. In the meantime, the
waste is piling up at intermediate storage facilities, for example,
in Ahaus in the western state of North Rhine-Westphalia and in
Greifswald in the eastern state of Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania,
where the radioactive scrap is cut into manageable sizes that are
suitable for storage. The mountain of radioactive waste has already
grown to an impressive 100,000 cubic meters.
Since
the storage situation is becoming more precarious, operators are
trying to have their old facilities carted off in increasingly larger
sections. For instance, in the southern German town of Obrigheim and
the northern German town of Stade, massive steam generators from the
reactors have been removed in one piece. Due to a lack of space, some
of these huge components have even been shipped to Sweden
Part
2: More Waste than Germany Can Store?
As
if there weren't already enough outstanding problems, a new type of
nuclear waste has emerged for which there is still no final
destination: graphite waste and depleted uranium that can't be sent
to the Konrad mining shaft.
Instead,
these materials that have been thoroughly contaminated with
radionuclides will most likely have to be buried in a future final
repository for highly radioactive waste. Germany's Federal Office for
Radiation Protection (BfS) estimates that there are up to 105,500
cubic meters of such waste. Until now, awareness of this problem has
been largely limited to nuclear experts.
This
could have unpleasant consequences for Germany. "In the worst
case scenario, there won't be enough space for this type of highly
radioactive waste in the storage facility," warns independent
nuclear expert Wolfgang Neumann of Hanover. "Then we'll have to
look for a third final repository," he concludes. The German
Environment Ministry is also keeping this option open, although
officially only two sites are planned.
Germany's
four main energy companies apparently see no problem, though, in the
decommissioning of nuclear power plants, at least that's the
conclusion drawn by a reference study that they commissioned from an
engineering company called NIS-Ingenieursgesellschaft. Until
recently, the results of this study have been kept under wraps by the
German Environment Ministry. Following a number of insistent requests
by Green Party parliamentarian Sylvia Kotting-Uhl, she finally
received a copy of the report in which the experts play down the
problem. The "decommissioning of Germany's light-water reactors"
is "assured," they wrote, adding that the impact on people
and the environment is "negligible."
The
engineers see the decommissioning timetable as a simple enough
matter, at least in theory. First, the fuel rods have to cool off
during what is known as the post-operational phase. Then there are
two possibilities: Either decommissioning begins immediately or the
reactor is mothballed. "Safe containment" is the name of
the process by which the remainder of the reactor is left standing
for up to 30 years until the radiation inside the building is further
reduced.
A
Business Model Erodes
But
critics of Germany's nuclear industry are pushing for a quicker
solution. They fear that the operating utility companies may be
bankrupt before the power plants have been dismantled. Their concerns
are not unfounded. After all, Germany's Energiewende -- Germany's
plan to phase out nuclear energy and massively increase its reliance
on renewable sources -- is eroding the business model of the former
electricity monopolists. At the same time, energy giants such as E.on
have billions in debts. Industry insiders estimate that it will cost
roughly €1 billion ($1.3 billion) to decommission a single nuclear
reactor.
To
avoid leaving it up to the state to absorb these costs, the owners of
nuclear power plants are bound by law to put aside money in their
annual budgets for the decommissioning phase. There is currently
roughly €30 billion earmarked for this purpose. But critics note
that these provisions only stand on paper. "If the company goes
broke, the billions for decommissioning are also gone," warns
Green Party parliamentarian Kotting-Uhl.
The
likelihood of this happening has increased with the reactors owned by
Sweden's Vattenfall company in Krümmel and Brunsbüttel, near
Hamburg. The Swedish state-owned company has transferred the risk to
its German subsidiary.
Consequently,
Kotting-Uhl is calling for a national decommissioning fund for
nuclear power plants and legislation requiring companies to pay into
it. Models for such an initiative can be found in Switzerland and
Sweden. But Environment Minister Altmaier rejects the notion. He
fears that the companies could use this to buy their way out of their
responsibilities. If the decommissioning turns out to be more
expensive than planned, the state could be forced to pick up the tab
for the difference. Regulations on insolvency insurance could help,
but there's not enough time to introduce them before the German
general elections in September 2013.
In
addition to financial worries, officials in Germany are very
concerned about the issue of which engineers and nuclear physicists
will ultimately be responsible for moving the waste to its final
underground destination. "Ever since the 1990s, we have observed
a rapidly declining number of students" in this area, complains
the head of Germany's Federal Office for Radiation Protection,
Wolfram König.
"The
German federal government and the states have to turn around this
trend," he says, and promptly makes a promise: "Anyone who
starts studying can count on having a job until they retire."
Translated
from the German by Paul Cohen
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