• smegforbrains@lemmy.ml
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    10 months ago

    “Every day, 13,000 liters of water flow into the Asse II nuclear waste storage facility in Lower Saxony, which is in danger of collapsing”

    “There are quite a few quantities. If you just think about it: these 102 tons of uranium, 87 tons of thorium, then these 28 kilograms of plutonium. And then we have a mix of many different chemotoxic agents and pesticides. We have about 500 kilograms of arsenic. And plutonium is not only radioactive, it is deadly even at the size of a grain of dust. You shouldn’t even think about what would happen if this shaft were to flood, that would still be possible. And the mountain really pushes upwards due to its pressure. Into the groundwater. That’s a catastrophe.”

    “These are waters that have direct contact with the radioactive waste, they run through a storage chamber and there we obviously have different pollution than with this water, which we collect up here…”

    “We have pictures from the chamber where we see, among other things, a yellow metal barrel that was squeezed between a concrete barrel and a chamber wall, meaning it was completely destroyed by the rock mechanical pressure. And we have also seen damaged lost concrete shields.”

    Source: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/marodes-atommuelllager-die-wachsende-gefahr-von-asse-ii-100.html

    There is no long term storage site for high level nuclear waste in Germany. So the issue of nuclear waste is clearly not solved.

    Intermediate storage facilities for high level nuclear waste are a security concern:

    https://www.bund.net/themen/atomkraft/atommuell/zwischenlager/

    Google translation: https://www-bund-net.translate.goog/themen/atomkraft/atommuell/zwischenlager/?_x_tr_sl=auto&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

    As stated before the idea is to employ renewable energy to produce green hydrogen for use in gas power plants. If you have no more coal power plants which is the target for 2038, you can not use it for hydrogen production. Germany wants to be self sufficient with regard to energy production, so we will have no other way to produce the hydrogen.

    You are right in being sceptical, but IMHO the strategy is viable and can be implemented. And producing zero nuclear waste and be climate neutral at the same time is something we will have to achieve in the near future.