Konrad shaft

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Plant Konrad 1 shaft with headframe
Headframe Konrad 1 shaft

The Konrad mine is an abandoned iron ore - mine in the city area Salzgitter between the districts Bleckenstedt and Sauingen east of the A 39 , about eight kilometers from Braunschweig removed. It is named after Konrad Ende , the former chairman of the supervisory board of Salzgitter AG . The mine will become a repository for low- and medium-level radioactive waste with negligible heat generation of a maximum of 5 × 10 18 Becquerel (5 trillion decayed atomic nuclei per second) of beta and gamma emitters and 1.5 × 10 17 Becquerel (150 trillion decayed atomic nuclei per second) converted to alpha emitters. Around 90 percent of the volume of radioactive waste generated in Germany belongs to this category, but it only includes around 1 percent of the total radioactivity of all waste. The headframe of the Konrad 1 shaft can be seen clearly from the A 39 and from Industriestraße Nord . It represents a landmark and is a listed building. The Konrad 2 shaft is located on the premises of Salzgitter Flachstahl GmbH .

prehistory

Lawn hanging bench of the Konrad shaft loading tank cars

The iron ore deposits have been the basis of industrialization in the Salzgitter area since the 19th century. The first Salzgitteraner ore was mined in 1867. The Konrad mine is the youngest of the former iron ore mines in this region. The ore was developed through two shafts , of which the Konrad 1 shaft was around 1232 meters deep and the Konrad 2 shaft around 999 meters deep. Production lasted from 1961 to 1976. During this time, a total of 6.7 million tons of iron ore were mined.

Approval procedure for the repository

After the end of ore mining, the Konrad mine was designated as a repository for nuclear waste in a nuclear process with public participation. The Konrad mine is considered to be exceptionally dry for an iron ore mine, although it is known that 16,300 liters of water daily enter the mine. Since this is an important criterion for the suitability of a repository for radioactive waste, appropriate investigations into the possibility of a repository were started in 1975. After these were positive, the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB), as the federal authority responsible for the final disposal at the time, submitted an application on August 31, 1982 to initiate a plan approval procedure . Since the documents prepared so far were considered insufficient for the plan approval procedure, an expanded site exploration program was started at the same time to provide long-term safety evidence for the mine and to supplement the previous plan data.

Almost 290,000 objections were received from May 16 to July 15, 1991 against the expansion of the former iron ore mine "Schacht Konrad" into a repository for low and medium level radioactive waste in one of the largest administrative proceedings in the history of the Federal Republic.

The hearing took place on 75 days between September 1992 and March 1993 and was the longest in the history of the Federal Republic. Participants were the company for the construction and operation of repositories , the applicant ( Federal Office for Radiation Protection ) and the licensing authority (Lower Saxony Ministry of the Environment). This then created a catalog of around 400 factual and 100 legal questions that had remained open. After a procedure lasting almost 20 years, the permit (planning approval decision) was granted on May 22, 2002. It includes the storage of a maximum of 303,000 m³ of "radioactive waste with negligible heat generation". Several lawsuits were filed against the decision at the Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court . The main points of complaint were the questioned long-term safety, feared incidents, dangers from the transport of radioactive waste and radioactive contamination during normal operation as well as the planning sovereignty of the municipalities. The oral hearing took place from February 28, 2006 to March 2, 2006 at the Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court. The judgment passed on March 8, 2006 dismissed the complaints and did not allow an appeal. Due to the fundamental importance of the ruling, individual plaintiffs nevertheless sought an appeal to the Federal Administrative Court (by means of a non-admission complaint ), which was not accepted in the ruling of March 26, 2007 (public notice: April 3, 2007). This ultimately confirmed the decision in favor of Schacht Konrad.

The plan was to dispose of the decommissioned reactor of the AVR Jülich experimental nuclear power plant in the Konrad mine. Since it turned out that it is not suitable for this due to the excessively high 14 C inventory of the reactor internals, Forschungszentrum Jülich, with the support of the BMBF , is currently investigating whether the approved limit value for 14 C in the Konrad shaft (400 TBq ) can be raised.

The intention to transport the nuclear waste to be removed from the damaged Asse-II to the Konrad mine has since been abandoned.

Repository mine

Storage chamber for the final disposal of low and medium level radioactive waste. The roadheading machine mills the new chambers and at the same time creates the overburden to the rear.

After the last-instance confirmation of the 2007 decision to operate a repository in the Konrad mine, the construction of the technical facilities for the repository and the emplacement chambers began. The retrofitting work will take several years; storage was initially scheduled to begin in 2008 for the end of 2013. According to the current status, completion and commissioning is expected in 2027. The final report of the Commission on the Storage of Highly Radioactive Waste named the date " if possible from the beginning of the next decade"; At the same time, the National Waste Management Program is cited in the final report, which explains that this date is still fraught with uncertainties .

Several emplacement chambers form a emplacement field. Theoretically, up to nine storage fields can be excavated, which can be accessed from the six existing main levels at depths of 800, 850, 1000, 1100, 1200 and 1300 meters. Since the total amount of nuclear waste to be stored was set at a maximum of 303,000 m³ in the plan approval procedure, only one of these storage fields will be created. The emplacement chambers will be built with a cross-section of around 40 m² with a floor width of around 7 meters and a height of around 6 meters. Their length should be between 100 and 1000 meters, depending on geological and mining conditions. After the containers have been put into storage, the chambers are poured in sections with a mixture of rock material and cement extracted during the drive in order to permanently store the nuclear waste there.

According to the Federal Office for Radiation Protection, the costs of converting the iron ore mine into a final repository for nuclear waste amount to around 2.2 billion euros. In the 1980s and 1990s, it was still estimated at 900 million euros. But by the end of 2007, EUR 930 million had been incurred for exploration and planning work. The Federal Office for Radiation Protection invoices the waste producers for the costs of setting up the repository.

In March 2013, the DBE announced that the commissioning of the repository could be delayed until 2021 due to additional renovation work. The spokesman Florian Emrich from the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) in Salzgitter said in October 2014 that setting up the camp would cost a total of at least 2.9 billion euros. However, he could not yet name a specific opening date. The last planned date in 2022 is uncertain. The focus is initially on safety and only then when the first waste can be delivered. The Federal Agency for Final Storage (BGE), which has been operating the repository since April 2017, announced in a press release on March 8, 2018 that it expected the construction work to be completed in the first half of 2027 - five decades after the start of the project and 25 years after it was granted the repository permit.

The Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (BMU) anticipates total costs for the construction of the Konrad repository of around 4.2 billion euros in February 2019, of which one third will be taxpayers and two thirds will be paid by private waste producers.

Events

As part of the festive day New Music 2010 State Theater Braunschweig was the concert on 29 May 2010 SHINE with the pieces PARADISE , GLOSS and NEBADON from the cycle KLANG by Karlheinz Stockhausen listed. Originally the event was supposed to take place in the transformer hall, but was then moved outside on the day of the event in the immediate vicinity of the shaft tower of Shaft Konrad 1. The reason for this was excessively loud residual noises after most of the devices in the transformer hall had been switched off. The event was organized by the orchestra director Martin Weller in close cooperation with the Federal Office for Radiation Protection .

Although the opinion had arisen with regard to the concert that the Konrad shaft should be represented positively, the Braunschweig State Theater took no position on this. Martin Weller said: "We neither want to make Konrad acceptable nor attack him with the concert."

literature

  • Gesellschaft für Strahlen- und Umweltforschung mbH - Institute for Deep Storage - in cooperation with Kernforschungszentrum Karlsruhe GmbH - Institute for Nuclear Waste Management (Ed.): Suitability test of the Konrad mine for the final disposal of radioactive waste - final report . Munich 1982.
  • Federal Office for Radiation Protection (Ed.): Konrad repository. Knowledge creates trust . Salzgitter 2009.
  • Federal Office for Radiation Protection (Ed.): Konrad repository. Answers to the most frequently asked questions . Salzgitter 2011.
  • Konrad mine - from the ore mine to the repository for radioactive waste. Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, 1987, 55 pages, hdl: 10013 / epic.45204.d001 (PDF; 10.5 MB)

Web links

Commons : Schacht Konrad  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Radioactive waste for the Konrad repository. Retrieved November 29, 2019 (the source cites 150 billion as a conversion of 1.5 × 10 ^ 17).
  2. ↑ Generation of radioactive waste . archiv.bge.de; accessed on June 30, 2018
  3. ↑ Konrad at a glance . endlager-konrad.de; accessed on March 16, 2018
  4. ^ Reimar Paul: Water in future nuclear waste dump: Konrad is threatened with drowning . In: The daily newspaper: taz . June 17, 2012, ISSN  0931-9085 ( taz.de [accessed on August 17, 2019]).
  5. ↑ Konrad repository. Knowledge creates trust. Federal Office for Radiation Protection, pp. 11–12.
  6. ↑ Konrad shaft as a repository: definitely not safe! Retrieved August 16, 2019 .
  7. ↑ KONRAD shaft - a never-ending story. Retrieved August 16, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Schacht Konrad: City not subject to complaints. salzgitter.de, March 26, 2008.
  9. ↑ kernenergie.de ( Memento from February 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  10. ↑ Nuclear waste from the Asse should go into the Konrad mine . faz.net, January 15, 2010
  11. ↑ Main operating plan for "Konrad repository" approved
  12. ^ Opening of the information center of the BfS. In: press releases. Federal Office for Radiation Protection, May 15, 2008, accessed on March 17, 2018 .
  13. ^ City of Salzgitter: Construction work will be delayed until 2027. In: salzgitter.de of March 8, 2018
  14. ↑ Final report (PDF) bundestag.de: Commission for the storage of highly radioactive waste materials, July 4, 2016
  15. ↑ Official website for the Konrad repository: final disposal
  16. ↑ Costs and cost allocation of the Konrad mine final storage project
  17. ↑ The Konrad nuclear repository is threatened with delay . Focus Online, March 30, 2013.
  18. ↑ Michael B. Berger: The excavators rotate in the Konrad shaft. Future storage facility for low-level radioactive nuclear waste is being expanded considerably / completion is still uncertain . In: Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung , October 21, 2014, p. 6
  19. ↑ Completion of the Konrad repository is delayed . Federal Agency for Final Storage (BGE), March 8, 2018
  20. ↑ Konrad shaft. Retrieved August 16, 2019 .
  21. ↑ festlichetageneuermusik.de
  22. ↑ Interview with Martin Weller. In: Braunschweiger Zeitung , May 19, 2010

Coordinates: 52 ° 11 ′ 1 ″  N , 10 ° 24 ′ 10 ″  E