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Public opposition to a dump for radioactive waste in northern Germany
has forced the government to hold a public hearing into the safety and suitability
of the plan – the first such hearing to be held in the country. An attempt
to delay the opening of the inquiry, at Salzgitter, was overridden by the
federal environment minister, Klaus Topfer.

A proposal to bury most of Germany’s low and intermediate level radioactive
waste at Schacht Konrad, a disused mine in Lower Saxony, has existed since
1975. The federal government employed consultants to evaluate the site’s
suitability, safety requirements and the dump’s impact on the environment.
In July, details of the design were made public.

By the end of September, 290 000 people from Brunswick and other nearby
towns had filed written objections to the proposals. The number of objections
forced the government to hold the public hearings.

According to Eckhardt Viehl of Germany’s Radiation Protection Authority,
which will run the dump for the federal environment ministry, more than
£230 million has been spent on the project so far. But the dump’s
opponents and Lower Saxony’s environment ministry, which is ultimately responsible
for licensing and safety monitoring at Konrad, claim that the consultants’
work is inadequate.

‘It’s just a big waste of paper,’ says Roland Hipp of Greenpeace. ‘Some
of the consultants’ reports are of such low quality they could have been
written by schoolchildren. There’s a great deal of missing information about
traffic patterns around the site and evacuation plans,’ he says. Some of
the official studies were carried out before the border between East and
West Germany was removed.

Late last month, as the hearings were due to begin, Lower Saxony’s environment
minister, Monika Griefahn, tried to use deficiencies in the official documents
to postpone the public hearing until more evidence was available. For her
trouble, she was reprimanded by Topfer, who insisted that Griefahn carry
on with the hearings. They eventually started on 28 September and are expected
to last until the end of this month.

The Salzgitter inquiry is expected to set a precedent for hearings about
other planned storage sites. If opponents succeed in blocking the Konrad
plan, Germany could find itself without a place to put a growing pile of
radioactive waste. ‘Last year western Germany alone produced 6000 cubic
metres of the type of waste which would be stored at Konrad,’ says Viehl.
‘And 50 000 cubic metres of waste is currently being stored at temporary
sites.’ Germany has no permanent waste storage facilities for any type of
radioactive waste, and temporary storage capacity is expected to be filled
within five years.