German state institutions at odds over options for treating nuclear waste with transmutation

A debate about the possibilities for treating nuclear waste in a way that greatly reduces the time that radioactive materials are considered a health hazard and thus reduce costs for dealing with the remnants of nuclear power production has pinned two state-owned institutions against each other.

An analysis released by the government’s Agency for Breakthrough Innovation (SPRIND) in early February said that recycling and so-called transmutation could reduce the period during which nuclear waste is considered hazardous from about one million years to less than 1,000 years. The analysis commissioned by SPRIND and carried out by Transmutex, a Swiss-based company that aims to build transmutation facilities in Germany, together with the Technical University of Munich said that a system based on accelerated neutron sources to convert isotopes could be made operational by 2035, if related legal changes to nuclear waste treatment are implemented soon. The analysis also argued that a changed approach to finding a final repository as well as a reduction of waste volumes by 90 percent could greatly cut costs.

Transmutating the non-recyclable and highly radioactive waste at a reference nuclear plant would take about 50 years, the authors added. The analysis said that the technology would already be economically viable with the first installation, gauging the construction costs at 1.5 billion euros, and argued that not seizing this opportunity would mean “numerous disadvantages and risks for future generations in comparison to current plans of unconditioned deep geological disposal.”

In a separate statement issued after the SPRIND analysis’s release, the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management (BASE) rejected these assumptions. While the ideas “are generally not new and initially sound tempting,” there is little evidence that they could be implemented any time soon. The proposed installation would consist of three components – a particle accelerator, a nuclear recycling plant and a new generation of nuclear reactor – none of which exist yet. “The technological developments required for successful realisation are at the level of paper or, at most, laboratory studies,” BASE said. Moreover, the nuclear waste management authority said that a deep repository would not become superfluous even if transmutation technology was implemented at scale as a complete removal of hazards has not been proven to be feasible.

Highly radioactive waste is currently held at 16 interim storage facilities close to Germany’s decommissioned nuclear power plants, the last of which went offline in April 2023. Germany had aimed to select a location for the final repository by 2031, but in 2022 the BGE pushed the deadline until at least 2046.