Site Selection Act
| Basic data | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Law on the search and selection of a site for a repository for high-level radioactive waste |
| Short title: | Site Selection Act |
| Previous title: | Law on the search and selection of a location for a repository for heat-generating radioactive waste |
| Abbreviation: | StandAG |
| Type: | Federal law |
| Scope: | Federal Republic of Germany |
| Legal matter: | Environmental law |
| References : | 751-23 |
| Original version from: | 23 July 2013 ( Federal Law Gazette I p. 2553 ) |
| Entry into force on: | January 1, 2014 (partly July 27, 2013) |
| Last revision from: | Art. 1 G of 5 May 2017 ( Federal Law Gazette I p. 1074 ) |
| Entry into force of the new version on: |
predominantly May 16, 2017 |
| Last change by: |
Art. 247 VO of June 19, 2020 ( Federal Law Gazette I p. 1328, 1357 ) |
| Effective date of the last change: |
June 27, 2020 (Art. 361 of June 19, 2020) |
| Weblink: | Text of the law |
| Please note the note on the applicable legal version. | |
The Site Selection Act ( StandAG ) of May 5, 2017 regulates the multi-stage process for the search for a repository for long-lived, heat-generating radioactive waste . It replaces the Site Selection Act of July 23, 2013.
Physical and technical background
The fission of uranium or other nuclear fuel in nuclear reactors produces a wide range of fission products . In addition, transuranic elements are incubated through neutron capture . The resulting material contains numerous radioactive isotopes that must be kept safe for a long time to prevent radioactivity from being released into the biosphere .
The half-lives of the isotopes in the decay series in spent nuclear fuel are very different: some isotopes decay within minutes, days or years; others take thousands, millions, or billions of years to do it. The amount of isotopes in the decay series can be calculated by the Bateman function . The half-lives are often only given for the starting isotope. In the decay series, however, isotopes occur that have a much longer half-life than the starting isotope. For plutonium-241 e.g. B. starting isotope has a relatively short half-life of 13 years, neptunium 237 as an alpha emitter has a half-life of 2.14 million years. In this series of decay there are 8 alpha decays up to the end isotope. So a total of 8 helium atoms are released per isotope Pu241, which considerably increases the rate of gas formation. Because of the intense activity of the short-lived fission products, spent fuel assemblies can initially only be handled under water; they are therefore kept in a cooling pool for several years . This is followed by either reprocessing or interim storage for decades . Waste from reprocessing must also be temporarily stored until the heat generation has decreased to such an extent that final storage is possible.
Storage in deep geological formations is the preferred repository concept worldwide. The shield against the biosphere consists of a sequence of barriers that come into play on different time scales: Interim storage has confirmed that fuel rods will remain tight for decades. Final storage containers should provide containment for centuries to millennia; Corrosion in the event of water contact is critical here. On longer time scales, it cannot be prevented that certain isotopes diffuse into the rock . It is critical here if pathways in the rock enable faster spreading via gas or liquid flows. On the longest time scales, there is also the possibility of erosion of the entire overburden. Complex geological studies are therefore required to determine the long-term safety of a repository.
prehistory
International
When the first commercial nuclear power plants were commissioned (USA 1956, Germany 1962 ), it was clear that this created the need to dispose of the radioactive waste that was continuously generated after an initial decay period of thirty to forty years. This task appeared to be of manageable difficulty and to be accomplished easily within the long term. In 1970, the physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker told Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt that the nuclear waste generated by the year 2000 would fit into a cube with an edge length of 20 meters: “If you seal and close it well and put it in a mine, you will hope that this problem has been solved. "
In the following decades, various repository concepts were proposed, under which only storage in deep geological formations appeared to be safe and feasible within a reasonable period of time and was pursued. Different states focused on exploring different host rocks. A few repositories were selected, but most of the projects failed due to technical deficiencies and / and local resistance, for example at Yucca Mountain in the USA.
Gorleben
The Federal Republic of Germany took a different route by preferring rock salt as the host rock . Salt domes , which are abundant in the North German Plain, have been stable for long geological times, impermeable to gases and liquids, but at the same time capable of creeping and therefore particularly suitable for tightly enclosing heat- generating waste. Disused potash pits are already being used as underground dumps for hazardous chemical waste ( Herfa-Neurode , Sondershausen ). The Asse mine has been operated as a research mine for large-scale final storage of radioactive waste since 1965.
The first search for a suitable repository site began at the end of 1973. On July 1, 1975, the commissioned nuclear fuel reprocessing company (KEWA) proposed three salt domes in Lower Saxony for closer examination. Investigations at these sites were stopped in August 1976 due to local protests.
A new location was then selected, this time by an inter-ministerial working group of the Lower Saxony state government. The Gorleben salt dome near the border with the GDR was selected from 140 locations in four rounds according to criteria such as volume, depth, population density, competing uses and, ultimately, structural policy and economic development , and in February 1977 the state government selected it as the location for the repository and a national waste disposal center named. A reprocessing plant and a nuclear power plant were also to be built in the vicinity .
These plans were soon protested against. In the state elections on June 4, 1978 , the Green List Environmental Protection (GLU) achieved 3.9 percent. In March 1979 the Gorleben trek with 500 tractors moved from Wendland to the state capital Hanover, where over 100,000 people gathered for the largest demonstration in the history of Lower Saxony. A few weeks later, Prime Minister Ernst Albrecht declared the reprocessing plant to be politically unenforceable, whereupon the State of Bavaria planned a reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf in the 1980s .
Finally, an exploration mine was built in Gorleben in the salt dome and above ground
- the Gorleben transport cask storage facility as an interim storage facility for spent fuel elements and vitrified high-level radioactive waste,
- the Gorleben waste storage facility as an interim storage facility for radioactive waste that generates low levels of heat and
- the Gorleben pilot conditioning system .
The transport cask store, which was built in 1981–83, went into operation after a long approval procedure and processes by all authorities in 1995 with the storage of the first Castor cask. Between 1995 and 2011, a total of 13 transports took place and 113 containers were stored. Each of these transports was secured by thousands of police officers and accompanied by large demonstrations. The transport was often stopped by rail or road blockades.
The underground exploration took place from 1986 to 2000, and after a ten-year moratorium from 2010 to 2012. The results achieved so far are assessed differently. It is particularly criticized that the suitability criteria have changed in the course of the exploration and that overburden suitable as a redundant barrier is no longer required. From 2010 to 2013 a parliamentary committee of inquiry dealt with Gorleben in order to "assess the orderliness of government actions in the past". The majority (CDU / CSU and FDP) and opposition (SPD, Left, Greens) could not agree on a common assessment.
Nuclear phase-out and restart of the location search
In the 1980s and 1990s, Germany began to turn away from nuclear energy . 1983 entry of the Greens in the Bundestag, 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster , exit decision of the SPD, 1,998 green-red First Schröder cabinet . In June 2000, the government agreed with the power plant operators on remaining terms, which were laid down in the 2002 Atomic Energy Act.
In the years 1999–2002 a working group for the selection process for repository sites (AkEnd) developed recommendations for a new “selection process for repository sites [plural!]”, Including a schedule that a few years later should appear hopelessly over-optimistic.
For a long time it had been disputed whether a national repository should be built for all types of radioactive waste, or whether it would be cheaper to store the large volumes of low and medium level radioactive waste separately from the small amounts of high level radioactive waste. With the approval for the Konrad shaft as a repository for non-heat-generating radioactive waste, which became legally binding in 2006 , this was decided in the latter sense.
From 2008, considerable irregularities in the Asse mine became known, which in 2013 led to the legal decision to retrieve all stored radioactive waste. This experience lent additional emphasis to the increasingly frequent international demand for a correctable repository concept with retrieval and recovery options.
The Merkel II cabinet extended the remaining terms for the German nuclear power plants in October 2010, but not only took it back six months later under the fresh impression of the Fukushima nuclear disaster , it also accelerated the nuclear phase-out. A decade-long antagonism ended with the almost complete reversal of the CDU / CSU. This made it possible to tackle upcoming tasks such as the search for a repository in a broad parliamentary consensus.
Under the leadership of Federal Environment Minister Norbert Röttgen , the government worked together with opposition parties to develop the site selection law described in this article, which was passed in 2013. Up until the end, it was a matter of dispute how to deal with the exploratory advantage at the Gorleben site. “In the law there must be no pre-determination on Gorleben, not even through the back door. The repository search law must not become a Gorleben Finding Law, ”demanded the SPD.
Content of the law
target
According to § 1 (1), the aim of the site selection process is "to find a location for a permanent disposal facility [...] that offers the best possible safety for a period of time in a science-based and transparent process for the domestically generated, especially highly radioactive waste guaranteed for a million years. "
Two things are remarkable about the last subordinate clause:
The qualification of the required security as " best possible " contradicts the previous approach of requiring " sufficient " security. If several locations offer sufficient security, the further selection could have been made according to the previous approach according to other, subordinate, for example spatial planning criteria. On the other hand, given a sufficiently differentiated security assessment, it is arbitrarily improbable that two locations are assigned the exact same level of security. Thus, apart from security, no other criterion may be taken into account. Strictly speaking, "as best as possible " also implies that the entire basic set of possible locations, i.e. the entire territory of the Federal Republic of Germany, is to be searched, which raises the question of whether a nationwide uniform database needs to be created.
Second, the definition of “ a million years ” is remarkable. Its physical background is that after this time at the latest, most of the long-lived transuranium elements have decayed to such an extent that the residual activity is no greater than the specific activity of natural uranium rock. Apparently, extremely conservative assumptions were made about the reference mass and the uranium mineral; a definition of 300,000 years could have been justified.
High Radioactive Waste Storage Commission
According to §§ 3–5, a commission of scientists and representatives of “social groups” as well as parliamentarians who are not entitled to vote was set up. It should review the Site Selection Act and present recommendations for action to the Bundestag and Bundesrat. Furthermore, the commission should develop safety requirements, elaborate host rock-specific exclusion and selection criteria, develop criteria for error corrections (e.g. retrieval / salvage of the waste), requirements for the organization and the procedure of the selection process and the examination of alternatives as well as proposals for Requirements for public participation and information to ensure transparency.
Sequence of the selection process
The main steps in the selection process are:
- Determination of sub-areas (§ 13)
- Overground exploration (§§ 14-16)
- Underground exploration (§§ 16-18)
- Final location comparison, location proposal and location decision (§§ 19-20).
implementation
Commission report
The repository commission according to §§ 3–5 met for the first time on May 22, 2014. After a one-time extension of the deadline, it presented a final report at the end of June 2016.
Individual evidence
- ↑ The French geoscientist and later Minister of Research Claude Allègre said: «On a raison de se mobiliser contre les méthodes de stockage; géologiquement parlant, le sous-sol est le plus mauvais endroit pour stocker les déchets à cause de l'eau qui y circule et pénètre partout. » Senate minutes of February 6, 2001 .
- ^ Joerg Albrecht: wrong ways into the repository . In: The time . No. 10/1997 ( online ).
- ↑ Disposal of highly radioactive waste in Germany - The Gorleben repository project, Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology, 2008 ( Memento of the original from June 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ A b Gisela Jaschik: March 1979: Gorleben trek to Hanover. In: North German History. ndr.de, accessed on March 22, 2011 (video).
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from May 26, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ D. Appel & J. Kreusch: The multi-barrier system for the final storage of radioactive waste in a salt dome , study on behalf of Greenpeace Germany, Hanover 2006.
- ↑ http% 3A% 2F% 2Fdip21.bundestag.de% 2Fdip21% 2Fbtd% 2F17% 2F137% 2F1713700.pdf Report of the committee of inquiry, Bundestag printed paper 17/13700
- ↑ Bundestag printed paper 17/13700, p. 259
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from February 17, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ On January 24, 2012, the SPD parliamentary group (Bundestag) decided on 'Principles and key points for a repository search procedure' www.spdfraktion.de ( Memento of the original from February 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . On February 2, 2012, the federal government presented a second draft of the repository search law. The SPD commissioned Dr. Wolfgang Renneberg with an expert opinion Archived copy ( memento of the original from February 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In March 2012, the federal government submitted a third draft of the repository search law [1] ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ http://www.spdfraktion.de/cnt/rs/rs_dok/0,,61109,00.html ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Confirmed z. B. 2006 by the Lüneburg Higher Administrative Court in its judgment on the Konrad mine , http://www.oberverwaltungsgericht.niedersachsen.de/portal/live.php?navigation_id=22004&article_id=79615&_psmand=134 .
- ↑ See the figure above, "Spent nuclear fuel decay sievert.jpg". Compare also [http% 3A% 2F% 2Fwww.irsn.fr% 2Fdechets% 2Fdechets-radioactifs% 2FDocuments% 2Firsn_livret_dechets_radioactifs.pdf & usg = AFQjCNFELDzyO4iGhpjYuBAvQaBs. D.
- ↑ Final report of the Commission for the Storage of Highly Radioactive Waste Materials ( BT-Drs. 18/9100 )
