Berlin denies new nuclear storage plan

But Berlin says there have been talks with the environment ministry of the state of Saxony-Anhalt, in whose jurisdiction Morsleben lies, about establishing a “statal depository for nuclear fuels”.

It was not permitted to keep nuclear waste in such a depository, said the environment ministry in Berlin. The aim was to create a facility for storing nuclear fuels whose owner was unknown, the ministry said, which the government had a duty to establish. There is no such facility in Germany now.

Waste is spent material, nuclear fuels are materials that can still be used.

Morsleben used to be in communist East Germany, which used a former salt mine there as its final nuclear dump. It is near Helmstedt, then a border crossing point between the two Germanies.

The newspaper "Mitteldeutsche Zeitung" had reported on Wednesday that an above-ground facility was to be built in Morsleben. The paper said it was unclear what kind and what amount of atomic waste was to be kept there.

The depository was to replace a facility shut down in Hanau, east of and close to the major city of Frankfurt on Main in west Germany. It was to cost about 1.5 million euros and be built by the end of 2007, the paper said.

The Saxony-Anhalt environment minister, Petra Wernicke, said the state government would resist the depository plans and that she’s written this to the federal environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, a Social Democrat. She’s a member of the conservative CDU party of federal chancellor Angela Merkel, who favours nuclear industry.

"We feel like a stopgap of the federation,” she told local radio. After the closure of the Hanau storage facility at the end of 2005, the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) had not done its duty to seek alternatives in good time, Wernicke said.

"Under time pressure the federation is now apparently coming up only with Morsleben and we resist that.”

According to the "Mitteldeutsche Zeitung" the entire CDU-led Saxony-Anhalt coalition government, which also includes Social Democrats, opposes the dump plan.

In his criticism, Interior Minister Holger Hövelmann, a Social Democrat, is said to have included that the state’s police would be very heavily burdened if they had to guard nuclear transports to Morsleben like those of waste to Gorleben.

Wernicke called on Berlin to seek alternative sites. But she conceded that juridically Saxony-Anhalt had practically no chance to resist a federal decision. The federation owned the grounds, she pointed out, and atomic law allowed location decisions to be made against the will of states.

The federal environment ministry spokeswoman said if Saxony-Anhalt really rejected the construction of a fuel-storing depot, Berlin would drop the idea.

The Federal Office for Radiation Protection says it’s ready to drop the Morsleben plan. If the state rejected the fuel storage “the Office will not pursue the project further”, the Office stated, but added it had not yet heard officially from the state government.

"I didn’t expect so fast a reaction from the BfS,” said Wernicke, adding that the Office apparently respected the political clarity of Saxony-Anhalt.

She concurred that talks about a fuel-keeping depot had started with Berlin in summer but not reached agreement. “The public disclosure has now brought movement into the matter.”

The opposition in Saxony-Anhalt, Left Party-PDS, also rejects the plans and has wondered aloud whether an above-ground storage might not be the thin edge of the wedge to reactivate the salt mine as a final dump for reprocessed spent fuel.

(It would be the same situation as in Gorleben, where a surface hall holds containers of waste while an exploratory salt mine nearby may be used as final dump, against strong local resistance. The Gorleben opponents argue that with every new arrival of waste, final dumping there becomes more likely.)

Nothing has emerged on what locations other than Morsleben are now being considered.

For more than 30 years there’s been an underground dump in Morsleben for weak and medium-active nuclear wastes.

After a salt block crashed into a mine shaft in 2001 work began to close down the depository for safety reasons.