Ahaus transport container warehouse
Coordinates: 52 ° 4 ′ 34.6 " N , 7 ° 3 ′ 20.1" E
The Ahaus transport cask storage facility (TBL Ahaus) is an interim storage facility for high and low level radioactive waste . It is located in the western Münsterland in the area of the city of Ahaus , about three kilometers east of the city center. The operator is the BGZ Gesellschaft für Zwischenlagerung . Previously, GNS Gesellschaft für Nuklear-Service was the operator of the interim storage facility from 1990 until the transfer of its interim storage activities to the federal government on August 1, 2017.
storage hall
The central warehouse is 196 m long, 38 m wide and 20 m high. The transport containers are stored upright. A bridge crane with a lifting capacity of 140 tons is used to transport the containers in the hall. In autumn 2008 another indoor crane with a lifting capacity of 32 t was installed. The CASTOR containers with highly radioactive waste in the eastern half of the hall are separate from transport containers made of concrete, cast iron and steel with low levels of radioactivity and negligible heat generation in the western half of the hall.
capacity
Approved quantities and types of waste
In the TBL Ahaus, a maximum of 3960 tons of nuclear fuel in the form of irradiated fuel elements from light water reactors (LWR) may be stored in Castor casks on 370 parking spaces. The storage capacity in the Gorleben transport cask storage facility is similarly large (3800 t).
In November 2009, the district government of Münster granted GNS permission to store low-level radioactive operational and decommissioning waste from German nuclear power plants in the Ahaus interim storage facility. These are conditioned residues with low heat generation, such as building rubble, paper, cleaning rags, scrap metal and dismantled plant components. The approval according to Paragraph 7 of the Radiation Protection Ordinance provides for limited storage for a period of 10 years. After that, the permit expires. Originally planned for 2014, the approved repository of the Konrad mine near Salzgitter is available for this waste ; in the meantime (2012), however, the Konrad shaft is expected to open in 2019 at the earliest, possibly not until 2024.
Current storage
On December 31, 2002 there were six CASTOR casks with LWR fuel elements in the store.
In addition, spherical fuel elements from the thorium high-temperature reactor, which was shut down prematurely, are stored in Schmehausen (a so-called pebble bed reactor ) in 305 small CASTOR containers on a further 50 storage spaces. 2 castors from Hamm contain the fuel elements of an auxiliary reactor integrated in the THTR-300. These fuel elements are uranium / aluminum metal plates with approx. 3.9 kg of highly enriched (93%) uranium. The fuel elements from the THTR-300 are also based on highly enriched, weapons-grade uranium, which is only incompletely consumed due to the short operating time of the reactor. This results in a proliferation problem .
Furthermore, fuel elements from the former Dresden-Rossendorf research reactor are temporarily stored in 18 Castor MTR2 casks.
Requested storage
When the Federal Office for Radiation Protection a permit for the storage of intermediate-level radioactive waste from is reprocessing of German spent fuel in France ( La Hague site ) has been requested for the interim storage facility. These are essentially high-pressure-pressed sleeves and structural parts - so-called CSD-C - from fuel elements of German nuclear power plants, which the Federal Republic of Germany had undertaken to take back under international law.
Furthermore, the GNS and the fuel element interim storage facility Ahaus GmbH (BZA) submitted an application to the Federal Office for Radiation Protection to change the existing storage permit for the interim storage facility Ahaus at the instigation of Forschungszentrum Jülich . As part of the approval process to be checked whether the currently Forschungszentrum Jülich 152 containers of the type Castor THTR / AVR fuel elements from the 1988 decommissioned stored pebble bed reactor AVR Ahaus can be kept in the future also in the intermediate storage. The handling and monitoring equipment in the Ahaus interim storage facility also meets the requirements for interim storage of these containers. They are identical in construction to the containers already temporarily stored in Ahaus from the thorium high-temperature reactor in Schmehausen. As for these castors, however, certain repairs, e.g. B. the lid seals in Ahaus could not be carried out, but that the castors would have to be transported to locations with hot cells . However, due to the poor quality of the application documents, the approval process for this transport to or storage in Ahaus was considerably delayed. Therefore, because of the approval of the Jülich interim storage facility, which expired in 2013, because of massive protests in North Rhine-Westphalia against the transport from Jülich to Ahaus and because of the negative attitude of the NRW state government, the FZJ Supervisory Board decided in November 2012 to move the 152 Castors to Ahaus refrain from applying for a temporary extension for the Jülich interim storage facility, starting planning for a new interim storage facility in Jülich and, alternatively, starting negotiations on the final storage of the castors in the USA.
Return of fuel rods to Russia
In September 2010, the Federal Office for Radiation Protection approved the return of fuel rods to Russia. These are 951 spent fuel elements from the former GDR research reactors at the Dresden-Rossendorf Research Center . These were brought to Ahaus in 2005 and were to be transported to the Mayak reprocessing plant ( Ural ) - in 18 castors divided into three transports . The return of the fuel rods has meanwhile been prohibited by the Federal Environment Ministry due to safety concerns.
Protests
There are regular protests in front of the nuclear waste dump. The citizens' initiative "No nuclear waste in Ahaus" is a member of the Münsterland action alliance against nuclear facilities . A citizens' initiative in the Rhineland is fighting, among other things, against the relocation of the 152 Jülich Castors to Ahaus.
Web links
BGZ / Ahaus interim storage facility
Individual evidence
- ↑ History - GNS. Retrieved April 17, 2019 .
- ↑ Editor: New interim storage company started in Essen - BGZ Gesellschaft für Zwischenlagerung mbH. Accessed April 17, 2019 (German).
- ↑ a b c d Website of the Gesellschaft für Nuklear-Service mbH (download on January 15, 2009)
- ↑ Storage of waste from nuclear power plants in Ahaus approved ( Memento of the original dated December 6, 2009 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. , Press release of the Münster District Government from November 11, 2009
- ↑ - ( Memento of the original from July 5, 2013 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.
- ↑ Castor containers remain in Jülich, Aachener Zeitung November 15, 2012, http://www.aachener-zeitung.de/news/politik-detail-az/2904362?_link=&skip=&_g=Castor-Behaelter-bleiben-in -Juelich.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.
- ↑ Press release of the Federal Office for Radiation Protection ( Memento of the original from October 21, 2010 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. (from September 23, 2010)
- ↑ Frankfurter Rundschau No. 262 of November 10, 2010. see also http://www.taz.de/1/zukunft/umwelt/artikel/1/proteste-in-beiden-laendern/
- ↑ https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/video/sendungsbeitrag84064.html
- ^ Protests against Ahaus. In: welt.de . October 19, 1997, accessed October 7, 2018 .
- ↑ - ( Memento of the original from June 26, 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.
- ↑ - ( Memento of the original from January 24, 2014 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.
