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A ship carrying castor seven containers filled with highly radioactive nuclear waste docked in the northern German port of Nordenham, Lower Saxony, on Tuesday morning, amid protests and a heightened police presence.
The nuclear waste is being transported from Sellafield in northwest England to a temporary storage unit in Niederaichbach in the southern German state of Bavaria. The waste left the northwestern English port of Barrow-in-Furness last Wednesday and is being transferred from ship to train in Nordenham before continuing southwards. The nuclear waste was what remained after the reprocessing of fuel elements from decommissioned German nuclear power plants.
The first of the containers, which are four meters (13 feet) long and weigh over 100 tons, was lifted off the special "Pacific Grebe" transport ship by a large crane on Tuesday morning and underwent inspection to measure radiation levels and ensure they matched those taken in Sellafield.
The port in Nordenham remains sealed off and guarded by heavily armed police, who have thus far reported no incidents, despite a number of protests by anti-atomic energy groups.
Heavily armed police are guarding the port in NordenhamImage: Sina Schuldt/dpa/picture alliance Nuclear waste: Why are people protesting?
"Every castor container carries enormous risk," said Helge Bauer from the protest group Ausgestrahlt, which means "radiated." "Nuclear waste should, therefore, only be transported once — to a permanent storage site."
Further protests are planned along the presumed route of the train carrying the waste over the coming days, including in the cities of Bremen and Göttingen.
"Every castor transport is one too many because it only postpones the problem and does not solve it," Kerstin Rudek, a spokesperson for the group Castor-Stoppen, said in a statement, adding that nuclear waste should not be moved until a safe, final storage location is determined.
Where is the waste from if Germany phased out nuclear energy?
Germany began phasing out the use of nuclear power in 2003, a process which was accelerated following the Fukushima disaster in Japan in 2011. Germany's final remaining nuclear power plants were shut down in 2023.
But Germany is still obligated to take back nuclear waste produced by used elements from its plants which, up until 2005, were regularly transported to reprocessing plants in Sellafield and La Hague, France. The transport of processed German nuclear waste back to the country has often been subject to protests.
According to the Society for Nuclear Service (GNS), over 100 castor containers were transported from La Hague to Gorleben, Lower Saxony, between 1995 and 2011. The final four were transported to Philippsburg, Baden-Württemberg, in 2024. Six containers were reportedly transported from Sellafield to Biblis, Hesse, in 2020, with seven more still to come.
Where does Germany store nuclear waste?
Germany's Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal (BGE) is still in the process of identifying a suitable location for the permanent underground storage of 27,000 cubic meters of nuclear waste produced over the course of 60 years of German nuclear energy production.
Nuclear waste, which can remain radioactive and, therefore, highly dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, is currently stored in 16 temporary locations above ground, but it can't stay there forever.
"We are using an empiric process to identify a location which offers the best possible security," the BGE's Lisa Seidel told public broadcaster NDR in November 2024.
Edited by: Sean Sinico
