While Germany struggles with the nuclear waste menace, Indian policy-makers are oblivious of the risk amid massive expansion of nuclear projects.
P K Sundaram
Gorleben, once a rather sleepy town on the bank of Elbe in Germany, has become a symbol of both insanity and hope in the nuclear age.
Self-assured that history has come to a halt at their feet, the rulers of what was then the West Germany selected Gorleben as a place where they could silently store their highly radioactive waste. They assumed the tonnes of waste in Gorleben could safely wait for ages till the technology to deal with nuclear wastes arrives. The reason it was selected as just that. Being on the border of East Germany and surrounded on three sides by the river Elbe which formed the border the West German government had no fear of anybody coming from the East. On the west side there was just one road leading in that could easily be controlled.
Now it is in the middle of the country and fairly easily approachable.
Not only they failed to predict about the technology, which has not materialized even after four decades, they also failed to predict about themselves: the German Democratic Republic (GDR) ceased to exist after 1989. Gorleben, which they thought would be safe for waste disposal as it fell on the well-guarded GDR border, is now a bustling town: with much larger population, an active economic life and some important transport routes passing through it.
Gorleben is to receive 120 tonnes of nuclear waste this year, lots of which is high level waste. The waste comes from La Hague in France where Germany sends its spent nuclear fuel to be reprocessed. According to a governmental contract with the French reprocessing company Cogema, Germany has to take back the residual waste. The container for the irradiated fuel is called “Castor” (Cask for Storage and Transport of Radioactive Material). Every year since 1996, the train bringing this nuclear waste from France has met fierce opposition, with anti-nuke activists from all over Germany and other parts of Europe and US joining local farmers to protest against the nuclear dump. Along the Castor’s route in France and Germany, people organize most imaginative mass protests: singing, dancing, blocking the train route and confronting the police while suffering its repression.
A train with 11 containers, holding about 123 tons of refuse, left the treatment plant in France for Dannenberg, a town in about 20 kilometres from Gorleben. (Credit: EPA/RUVR)
The Gorleben transport container storage unit (Transportbehälterlager Gorleben) hosts about 100 containers at present. Its total capacity is of 420 containers. This is an interim storage where spent fuel elements and vitrified, highly radioactive waste is being stored for next few decades. Once this waste is cooled off, this waste is supposed to be sent to the Long-Term Waste Storage Units in Salt Dome. This long-term storage facility is also controversial as experts have raised serious questions over its viability for coming 24,000 years. The results of exploratory geological drillings done in 1980s have shown that the rock salt there may prove to be unstable and can even seep into ground-water and contaminate it.
This year, Gorleben witnessed very high-voltage protests. As Germany has recently decided to phase out
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