Würgassen – The Citizens’ Initiative Atomic Free 3-Ländereck remains: It continues to see an “unobjective and sometimes incorrect approach” when choosing a location for a nuclear waste storage facility in Würgassen.
In a video press conference on Friday, the BI board decidedly rejected the criticism of the federal association for interim storage (BGZ) of the legal and planning expert opinion commissioned by BI. Already in December, the lawyer Siegfried de Witt (Potsdam) and the planning engineer Prof. Karsten Runge (Hamburg) tried to prove serious deficiencies in their expertise in the BGZ’s decision in favor of Würgassen. On and next to the site of the former nuclear power plant, the BGZ wants to build a huge storage facility for the Konrad mine near Salzgitter, where medium and low level radioactive waste from all over Germany will be disposed of from 2027.
After BI published the report, the BGZ accused de Witt and Runge of considerable deficiencies and errors in statements and publications. In a superficial work, claims are made without substantiating them, the BGZ had declared.
“The BGZ tried to discredit the report, but was unable to invalidate the actual content,” said Professor Martin Hörning, board member of BI, in the press conference on Friday. In all of its argumentation, the company for interim storage is not entirely honest, said Hörning. She is euphemistically speaking of a logistics center, but actually wants to build a federal interim storage facility for all radioactive waste. Würgassen is planned as the “mother of all interim storage facilities”. The central storage facility is an entry storage facility for the Konrad repository, said Hörning.
This is what it says in the Transitional Disposal Act. “A central mistake of the BGZ is that it decouples this. And want to fool the population because they are simply looking for a remote location for which there is no rational justification ”.
Like its reviewers, the citizens’ initiative continues to see the criteria according to which Würgassen was selected by the BGZ as a location without alternative, as “poorly compiled and poorly applied”. The report by the Ökoinstitut, which the BGZ cites as confirming its approach, does not correspond to technical standards.
According to the BI, the BGZ does not take safety concerns seriously when dealing with medium and low level radioactive waste. “Here radioactive waste is to be transported a few million additional kilometers of freight through the country and the BGZ pretends to be mineral water bottles,” said Hörning.
From the point of view of the citizens’ initiative Atomfreies 3-Ländereck, there is no rational justification for the federal and BGZ’s adherence to Würgassen, because the BGZ is factually and technically wrong. “There is no headwind from Berlin for the company,” explains BI cashier Hubertus Hartmann. “While members of the federal and state parliaments, city councilors, council members and district assemblies in the region opposed a nuclear waste storage facility in Würgassen, nothing would come from Berlin. Hartmann: “A tailwind from the capital would help us.” The BI therefore counts on the Bundestag’s environmental committee to deal with the subject of the Würgassen nuclear waste storage facility on site. (Gerd Henke)
