Lord Mayor Frank Klingebiel made this clear to the state parliament's environment committee on Monday. In the paper, the two government factions demand, among other things, a disposal concept "that includes all types and quantities of low and medium-level radioactive waste and defines requirements for a site search procedure for this waste".
"We have been criticizing for years that Schacht Konrad was selected as a nuclear repository in the 1980s without checking whether there were more suitable sites. Today, such a site comparison would be mandatory," says Klingebiel.
He wants to ensure that the assessment of the Konrad mine is based on the current state of science and technology. "The license for the Konrad mine dates back to 2002, and the safety calculations and analyses are already over 25 years old. A lot has happened in research since then."
According to Klingebiel, it is very pleasing that further demands that the city of Salzgitter has been making for years have been included in the draft resolution: for example, the retrievability of high-level radioactive waste demanded by the Final Repository Commission must also apply to low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste in order to give later generations the opportunity to react to more recent research findings. In addition, an expansion of the Konrad mine beyond the 303,000 cubic meters of nuclear waste approved to date must finally be definitively ruled out.
The Mayor of Salzgitter welcomes the fact that the environmental policy spokespersons of the CDU and CSU parliamentary groups in the state parliaments have recently published a resolution in Hanover calling for the categorical exclusion of an expansion of the Konrad mine and for "serious and open-ended repository research".
It is all the more incomprehensible, however, that the same resolution insists on the "fastest possible commissioning of the Konrad mine". "I don't understand why seriousness and openness to results should be overridden at Schacht Konrad," said Klingebiel.
He agrees that the phase-out of nuclear energy cannot be achieved without a conclusive final storage concept. "But safety must clearly take priority over speed. And to say 'we have nothing else' is a very weak argument for a repository in the Konrad mine."
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The disused iron ore mine Schacht Konrad in Salzgitter is the only approved nuclear repository in Germany. Up to 303,000 cubic meters of low- and intermediate-level radioactive waste are to be stored in it by 2022 at the earliest. The underlying planning approval procedure was initiated in 1985 and did not include a site comparison.