Environment Committee: BfE on the Repository Site Selection Act

Wolfram König, President of the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management

The draft bill defines the repository site selection procedure with its key partial steps. The Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management directs the proceedings and is responsible for the public participation.

Objective and time frame

From the viewpoint of the conductor of the procedure, the overall objective should reflect the planned amendments:

The objective is to taks into operation a repository for heat-generating radioactive waste in Germany. At the end of the procedure, a repository site offering the best possible safety must have been found, where subsequently a repository can be constructed rapidly. The site selection procedure must be completed with an acceptable perspective in terms of safety and time.

This time frame was addressed in the currently effective StandAG by stating the following in the justification relating to the time date of a site decision: "The task of searching and selecting a site for a repository for heat-generating radioactive waste should be solved in this generation. To express this objective, it is determined that the site selection procedure shall be completed by the year 2031. All parties involved shall direct the tasks to be undertaken by them to comply with the time frames."

This draft bill has put the process sequence in more concrete terms, providing for new participation steps and possibilities for legal protection. In § 1 para. 5, a site decision in the year 2031 is now "striven for".

Already under the boundary conditions of the StandAG adopted in 2013, meeting the objective within the required timeframe was ambitious and was questioned in terms of achievability. With regard to the overall procedure's focus, however, an ambitious schedule is vital. Extending the procedure would mean that interim storage would have to continue even longer and that the safety gain based on storage in deep geological formations would be delayed for an indefinite period.

The question arises whether the process sequences planned in the bill are suitable to make the scheduled targets achievable.

Boards and scientific advice

Another addition is that further expert advisory boards will be established or, respectively, boards can seek scientific advice. In view of the already existing bottlenecks in expert and scientific expertise in the field of nuclear waste management, independent advice is desirable but hardly achievable.