Status of spent fuel and radioactive waste management in Germany -- Development of casks and waste treatment equipment
- Gesellschaft fuer Nuklear-Service mbH, Hannover (Germany)
At present, 20 nuclear power plants produce approximately one third of electricity in Germany. The proper disposal of the spent fuel and waste arising from operation of these plants is largely dealt with jointly by the German electricity suppliers, making use of their subsidiary company GNS. The utilities are responsible for the spent fuel and radioactive waste management; the final repositories are a federal matter. The German electricity suppliers thus concluded additional contracts with the reprocessing companies COGEMA in France and BNFL in the United Kingdom, amounting to approx. 5,500 t HM plus 2,800 t HM as new contracts. In the course of 1994, the German parliament passed a new act (Artikelgesetz) which provides the electricity suppliers an opportunity to choose between reprocessing and direct final disposal. This act is of major importance inasmuch as recent calculations show a clear financial advantage of direct final disposal. As these two disposal paths pose widely differing requirements to plant technology and storage capacities for spent fuel and waste, any kind of conceptual planing requires a high degree of flexibility. Direct final disposal of fuel assemblies as an alternative to reprocessing gains importance to the same degree as reprocessing is considered to be economically no longer justifiable. Limits to the permissible heat load in the planned Gorleben repository require long cooling periods for fuel assemblies which shall be achieved by intermediate storage in AFR stores. If the German utilities decide to stop reprocessing in favor of final disposal, the already constructed and licensed AFR stores at Gorleben (TBL-G) and Ahaus (BZA) will be used. Applications have been filed for the acceptance of fuel assemblies with a higher burn-up (> 60 MWd/t HM) or shorter cooling periods and of new casks with a higher capacity, e.g. the CASTOR V type series.
- OSTI ID:
- 220837
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-950197--
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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