Abstract
In May 1998, regula-tors at Germany's Ministry of Environment and Nuclear Safety learned that for more than a decade they had been kept in the dark about the radioactive contamination that nuclear power plant personnel routinely found on equipment—the casks and rail cars—used to move spent fuel from 20 German power reactors to reprocessing plants in France and Britain.
The level of contamination did not pose a health hazard, regulators concluded. But the government was embarrassed and angry that utility companies had never reported it to safety authorities in Bonn, and in response the ministry slapped an indefinite ban on all shipments of spent fuel and high-level reprocessing waste. After the Social Democrats and Greens took power at the end of 1998, the utilities were forced, in part by the contamination scandal, to agree to the Greens' long-sought phase-out of nuclear power by about 2030.
March 27: Anti-nuclear activists block a regional train near Dannenberg, Germany. They were protesting the rail shipment of nuclear waste from France to Gorleben in northern Germany.
The transport ban was finally lifted this spring. But its ghost will continue to haunt the German nuclear industry's efforts to come to grips with a mountain of plutonium. For nearly two years, no spent fuel had been moved from any German power reactor site. Until the transport ban, about 80 shipments were carried out each year—mostly of spent fuel sent to reprocessing plants in France and Britain.
Leaving Dannenberg on March 29: Police guard the containers of waste as they complete the last leg of their journey to Gorleben by truck.
Until the contamination was revealed, these frequent and routine shipments attracted little notice. Environmentalists critical of nuclear energy didn't seem to care—the spent fuel was leaving the country. “Their attitude seemed to be ‘good riddance,’” said Klaus Janberg, until this year the director of gns mbH, a German vendor of transport and dry storage equipment.
Some Germans did care, however, about spent fuel being shipped from reactors to interim dry storage sites in Ahaus and Gor-leben, in the north of the country. On four occasions since 1995, the most recent in late March, utility companies shipped by rail a few casks of nuclear material to these facilities.
Each time, the shipments were greeted with massive demonstrations, organized by a fiercely dedicated local opposition group near Gorleben. The fringe of the protests included armed anarchists and, lately, thug-gish neo-Nazis. At Gorleben, battles with thousands of riot police have become routine, and law enforcement agencies say the number of violent agitators has grown with each transport. In June 2000, utility companies and the new government agreed to work together to end shipments to Gorleben and Ahaus and instead set up dry storage facilities at each of Germany's 15 reactor sites.
With spent fuel piling up at those reactor sites, the new government was able to apply the transport ban like thumbscrews, forcing utility bosses to negotiate—and last year finally to agree to—a phase-out of nuclear power. If spent fuel could not be moved off site, German law would require that reactors with filled ponds be shut down, one by one, beginning this year. According to one negotiator at E.ON Energie AG, Germany's biggest nuclear power generator, “In the end the bottom line was that we agreed to fix lifetimes for each of the reactors if they guaranteed not to choke us on our spent fuel.”
An end to reprocessing
The other force at work is growing public opposition to the plutonium fuel cycle. A side agreement, negotiated together with the timetable for shutting down German power reactors, calls for a permanent ban on shipments of spent fuel to France and Britain after July 1, 2005. That date is timed to coincide with the expected completion of the on-site spent fuel dry storage facilities now being licensed.
The deal will put an end to the country's 25-year-old policy on reprocessing spent fuel. To the architects of the phase-out, pulling the plug on the “plutonium economy” was a primary goal and a major achievement.
During the 1970s, Germany fiercely resisted U.S. pressure to join it in mandating the once-through nuclear fuel cycle based on geological disposal of spent fuel. Chancellor Helmut Schmidt argued that the then-current OPEC oil crisis taught the lesson that plutonium was a valuable resource.
When Germany's Nuclear Energy Law was amended in 1974 to mandate that plutonium be recycled, Germany was already a pioneer in the development of mixed-oxide (mox) fuel. Soon after the oil crisis, it began to implement plans to use MOX, primarily in a line of breeder reactors, the first of which, the SNR-300, was under construction at Kalkar.
In 1991, however, Germany finally abandoned efforts to license the SNR-300 and put off plans for the fast reactors it had counted on to absorb a large share of the country's separated plutonium. Germany also gave up on plans to build its own commercial-scale reprocessing plant at Wackersdorf. Instead, German utilities signed additional reprocessing contracts with France's Cogema and British Nuclear Fuels Limited (bnfl), and shipped more and more of their spent fuel abroad. Without breeders, a mountain of plutonium loomed just over the horizon.
During the last 10 years, an initially experimental program to burn mox in power reactors was gradually expanded. German utilities have contracted for the reprocessing of nearly 7,000 metric tons of spent fuel. This includes 1,127 metric tons covered by so-called “new” contracts signed in 1989 with Cogema, which call for spent fuel to be reprocessed upon demand, and 302 metric tons covered by “new” contracts signed with bnfl in 1990. Reprocessing under earlier agreements with Cogema ended in 2000, but reprocessing under earlier agreements with bnfl will not be completed before 2004.
The new contracts with Cogema and bnfl were concluded after the German reprocessing plant at Wackersdorf was abandoned. In 1994, however, German law was changed to allow either reprocessing or geological disposal of spent fuel, and the German utilities renegotiated more favorable terms. According to experts close to the nuclear safety agency who have seen the contracts, the new terms allow German utilities to store spent fuel at the French and British reprocessing facilities for as long as 25 years before making a final decision on whether to reprocess. If they choose not to, the spent fuel will be repatriated to Germany and they will pay storage charges, but will not be subject to an added penalty. These contracts cover spent fuel discharged from German reactors until 2005, with possible extensions through 2015.
The total amount of plutonium in German spent fuel covered by all the reprocessing agreements is about 67 metric tons, of which an estimated 40 tons is fissile plutonium. Disregarding the amount already processed into MOX and shipped back to Germany, there are just about 45 metric tons awaiting a disposal decision by government and industry.
Industry officials say that the deal's five-year window gives the utilities enough time to send all the spent fuel covered by the bnfl and Cogema contracts to be reprocessed on schedule. But it is not at all clear that the spent fuel will be shipped and reprocessed, and the plutonium returned and recycled.
The economic risk
For more than two decades, most anti-nuclear organizations were united in their determination to halt reprocessing. After 1995, when regulators in the Social-Democrat-and-Green-ruled state of Hesse successfully opposed the licensing of a $500 million, commercial-scale mox fabrication plant that was more than 90 percent finished, German utility companies began to understand the political risks of their plutonium recycling program. At about the same time, the European Commission began deregulating Europe's power market, and German utility executives became more sensitive to shareholders' warnings about management's fiduciary duties. They began reassessing the costs and benefits of the closed fuel cycle.
Back in 1987, several spent fuel managers at RWE Energie ag presented a paper at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna in which they argued that the utilities would be better off if they deferred decisions about reprocessing for 50 years. One of the authors later recalled that they were nearly sacked for challenging Germany's spent-fuel-policy orthodoxy. But by the time phase-out negotiations heated up in early 2000, another spent-fuel manager concluded, “It's clear to everybody involved in this exercise that the business of reprocessing doesn't really have a future. The question then is, do we break it off with a crowbar, or do we coast down to a soft landing?”
The crowbar method has already failed. An effort by the government to cancel the existing reprocessing contracts ended last year after the British and French governments threatened retaliation.
Logistics
Industry sources say that fulfilling the contracts will require moving about 200 cask loads of spent fuel to La Hague and another 200 to Sella-field. According to regulatory officials, between 600 and 700 metric tons of spent fuel are scheduled to be moved to Britain, and about 1,000 metric tons to France.
But shipping the spent fuel to France and Britain presents some daunting challenges. First, Germany tightened transport licensing requirements after the 1998 revelations about surface contamination. Second, foes of nuclear energy in France and Britain may start to organize German-style protests in an attempt to keep German spent fuel away from La Hague and Sellafield. Their consciousness was raised early this year when French judges, interpreting a 1991 national waste law forbidding the indefinite storage of foreign nuclear waste in France, warned that unless Cogema had watertight authorization to reprocess cargoes shipped to La Hague, the materials could not be unloaded.
Meanwhile, German utilities are planning to use up all the plutonium by burning it as MOX in power reactors. Twelve German reactors have been licensed to burn the fuel, and by the end of 1999, about 13 metric tons of fissile plutonium had been burned in 11 reactors. The twelfth reactor has not yet been loaded with MOX.
The utilities have told the nuclear safety agency that they will burn mox fuel containing 28 metric tons of fissile plutonium by the end of 2011. That amount corresponds very closely to the amount of plutonium contained in the spent fuel under contract with BNFL and Cogema and not yet returned and recycled.
German plutonium: Where is it?
These plans are not without uncertainty. One reactor, Lingen, will not get any plutonium back from abroad until at least 2005. Some reactors counted on to burn Mox have not yet been awarded licenses by the states, or are awaiting licenses to burn larger amounts of mox in their cores.
German experts add that conflicts may arise out of the diverging business interests of the individual utilities. So far the lion's share of plutonium has been burned in reactors owned by E.ON Energie. In contrast, none of Hamburgische Electricitaets-Werke ag units has a mox license. Some plutonium was generated at older reactors that will be shut down before 2011; their plutonium output will have to be swallowed by other reactors, some of which are owned by other utilities.
So far regulators are pressing the utilities to burn as much plutonium as possible in the reactors that produced it. “We don't want to see a plutonium bazaar springing up here,” one regulator said. But, he added, some plutonium trading among utilities is “inevitable.”
Legal issues
Even if the government accepts a certain amount of plutonium trading, utilities may still face a legal hurdle. Officials currently drafting the phase-out law want to force the utilities to show they have firm contracts with mox fuel fabricators and that they can use up the material before their reactors are shut down. The draft language of the proposed amendment reads: “Reactor operators are expected to demonstrate that the use of the plutonium, produced from reprocessing, can be guaranteed in their reactors.” Said one regulator, “If utilities don't have firm mox contracts, then they can't ship more spent fuel” to Britain or France. But as one spent fuel manager told me, “We can't produce contracts for all this plutonium right now.”
Part of the reason they can't lies in the deep uncertainty about mox fuel-fabrication capacity. Confidential documents show that until last year, German utilities expected to get back mox containing 8.5 metric tons of heavy metal (uranium and plutonium) from bnfl's mox Demonstration Facility in Sellafield. But after the quality-control scandal about mox sent from the plant to the Kan-sai Electric Power Co. in Japan in 1999, BNFL ended the plant's operations for foreign clients. German utilities also planned on receiving 147.5 metric tons of heavy metal from an aging mox plant at Dessel, Belgium—more than three times that plant's maximum annual output.
The biggest question marks concern Cogema. German utilities cannot expect to have their mox fabricated at the Melox plant at Marcoule because its total capacity is required by Electricité de France. Cogema is pressing the French government to let the plant produce an additional 150 metric tons of heavy metal in mox a year for foreign clients, arguing that no appreciable engineering modifications would be necessary. But the Green-led Ministry of Environment in Paris won't cooperate, and no license has yet been awarded. German utilities expect to obtain the largest share of their mox—262.6 metric tons of heavy metal—from Cogema's Com-mox plant at Cadarache. But the mox will trickle back to Germany, because that plant is currently able to produce only 35 metric tons per year.
German utilities are also planning to have mox fabricated at bnfl's just completed Sellafield mox Plant. But the British government has not authorized the plant's opening, and it is possible that it may never open.
In the meantime, the German government has said that building down Germany's foreign plutonium stockpile is a priority. In January, the Federal Ministry of Economics told the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, that this goal must be accomplished before German utilities could even consider getting involved in a scheme floated by the United States to burn plutonium from Russia's dismantled weapons in their reactors. “Because utilities already have a large stockpile of plutonium from the operation of their reactors that must be recycled, the use of mox made from weapons plutonium is not foreseen in German reactors,” the ministry said.
That position would not change, the ministry added, even if the Russian side were to sweeten the bargain by offering to lease the mox and take back the spent fuel. “German policy is based on the principle of national responsibility for nuclear waste” and “precludes the final disposal outside of Germany of any spent fuel burned in German reactors.”
A third way?
Inside the government, debate is still raging over whether utilities should be encouraged to burn plutonium or whether, by employing bureaucratic levers including additional rules and regulations, the government should prod the utilities to consider disposing of as much unreprocessed spent fuel and separated plutonium as possible as waste.
Government regulators who are critical of mox fuel argue that burning mox generates still more plutonium, so that the amount of plutonium in a reactor's core remains constant or increases slightly. Some German critics of mox have proposed processing the plutonium not into reactor fuel but into unusable “off-spec” mox assemblies, which would be disposed of as waste. No formal decision has been made by the federal government, experts involved in discussions said in March. But most German industry experts are not enthusiastic about the idea.