THE WORLD NUCLEAR WASTE REPORT — 2019
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FOREWORD More than 40 years ago in my home region, the forest near the village of Gorleben was chosen as the location for the German National Nuclear Waste Disposal Center. The site, which is now at the country’s center but at the time was located directly on the border between East and West Germany, was meant to host all facilities for reprocessing, treatment, storage, and a deep geological repository. The company responsible (which has long since closed) intended to open the repository for spent fuel in the salt dome named Gorleben-Rambow in 1999. After Fukushima, the German government decided to phase out nuclear energy for the second time. The experience of the nuclear catastrophe in Japan in 2011 also set in motion the review of the plans for the repository at Gorleben. After around 40 years of debating and fighting over Gorleben, the German government and parliament decided in favor of a new participatory site selection process for the repository for high-level nuclear waste. Looking back at the last 40 years and forward over the many decades until a repository might be available illustrates the difficulties for humankind to cope with the eternal legacies of nuclear energy. Considering the 40-year history of attempted disposal at Gorleben, and the many problems and challenges we now know about, it is unrealistic to expect the commissioning of a repository before the second half of this century. Germany is not the only country in search of a suitable repository or facing difficult decisions about nuclear waste. For the last 15 years, as a member of the European Parliament, I followed the attempts at phasing out nuclear energy in and outside of the European Union. An important initiative came from Mycle Schneider, Paris, who suggested refuting the fairytale of a global nuclear renaissance. He and his team of authors release the yearly World Nuclear Industry Status Report, which proves that renewable energy is defeating nuclear power both because of tremendous risks of nuclear technology, and because of its high price. During the presentation of the status report in recent years, we had more and more questions about the absence of the nuclear waste issues, especially since these issues are also a factor for the costs of nuclear power. In the past years I also followed the European Commission’s efforts to establish a better overview and a common framework for decommissioning, nuclear waste management, disposal, and financial provisions. The recurring questions and the disappointing outcome of the European Commission’s initiative motivated me to tackle this challenge with the idea of the WORLD NUCLEAR WASTE REPORT (WNWR). In this first edition our team of European experts describes the technologies, strategies, preparatory processes, and financial provisions for disposal. We are convinced that information from national contexts should be both better accessible and comparable. In spite of international conventions on nuclear waste, even categories for waste classification differ from country to country.
Deep geological disposal is one of the most ambitious and most difficult tasks on earth. The specific risks of nuclear waste require a safe enclosure for one million years. In addition, disposal strategies promise the possibility of retrieval and recovery at least for a limited period. The carelessness and the hubris in the nuclear industry and in pro-nuclear governments around the risks of nuclear waste have created mistrust rather than confidence among citizens. We face a difficult task ahead: the search
