Even though the administrators of the German state knew there were serious problems in Asse II some years ago, it was not till this Summer that the topic reached public discussion at Government level. The former salt mine at Asse which is held up as a model for deep geological repository storage of radioactive material by many states including the UK has however been in public consumption all along. Coz it's leaking into the water table and then through cows into breakfasts all over Germany and the civilized milk consuming public. That gives a new twist to heavy water.
89,000 tons of radioactive waste are stored in the facility. 130,000 barrels of middle and low radiative waste, and then more kilograms you could lift of Plutonium and Caesium which despite being very heavy was moved deeper to 147 - 750 meters below the surface when technicians and visitors noticed the drums were rusting. This was very good for public relations. The operator though to its credit is keen to point out that no less than 8 times it told the German authorities the facility was full. No room at the Inn they said. But the rent continued to increase in line with inflation. That is the capitalist way. Here is their website which falls into the chirpy and cheery category of information management. Quite literally on top of their subject – are they.
http://www.helmholtz-muenchen.de/en/asse/wir-ueber-uns/uebersicht/index.html The inquiry which begun in June when Caesium was found outside the facility (at the interim stage between being in a deep water aquafier and a cow the German state safety agency for all things glow in the dark offered to phase out the facility by 2014. One would be expected to think that in political terms this transfers into the forgiveable hope that “the other party will be in power” then. It might seem surprising then that both members of Germany's largest political factions are upset. Until you remember that the two largest factions are indeed in a grand "labour-conservative" coalition and unless either the hoodie lefty soya drinking minorities or the salute giving neo steroid right get into power by 2014 there really will be no passing of the buck or shifting of the blame on this one.
That leaves us with the revindicative "told you so!" - very satisfying.
Or one of the few German words which have entered the English language, the concept of schadenfreude. We may all be happy that this has happened to the Germans rather than say for example us or our unemployed salt mining communities. But that would be ideologically unsound, Theodor Adorno defined schadenfreude as “largely unanticipated delight in the suffering of another which is cognized as trivial and/or appropriate.” & he was a respected intellectual.
There is very good background information on this story from June in English language on German (((i))) Indymedia
http://de.indymedia.org/2008/06/220670.shtml & in German language too
http://de.indymedia.org/2008/06/220679.shtml http://de.indymedia.org/2008/07/221427.shtml & this is what the mainstream commercial press have said today as the scandal is being sloshed around as if no-one wants to touch it.
Ironic.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,576362,00.html The center-left Süddeutsche Zeitung writes:
"It's good that responsibility and control of a final storage facility -- which Asse-II always was -- has shifted away from the science and research side. The experts at the Helmholtz Center may have known what they were doing 8,000 meters under the ground, but the urgency to make it all transparent -- precisely because a population so sensitive to nuclear power issues lived overhead -- escaped them. The real question is whether Sigmar Gabriel has overestimated the PR-potential of Asse-II for himself. Already some officials in the Lower Saxony region of Wolfenbüttel -- where the mine is located, and where Gabriel himself has his constituency -- resent the fact that he has dramatized this scandal. When he talks in the language of disaster he is playing, in these officials' minds, with the fears of the German population, in order to pose as a savior."
The center-right Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:
"Such a rash agreement between two nuclear experts (Gabriel and Schavan), who also happen to be ministers from rival political parties, one of whom belongs to Chancellor Merkel's party and even sits in for her as chairwoman of the Christian Democrats, cannot pass without comment. That Dr. Schavan has hardly resisted Gabriel's confiscation of the high ground in this controversy can be interpreted in exactly one way: The situation at Asse-II is impossible to justify in public. Therefore the Christian Democrats have let Gabriel win the public squabble, hoping he'll stop his I-told-you-so bossiness … Whether the Christian Democrats will win back the leeway to continue their argument in favor of nuclear power, though, is still an open question."
The conservative daily Die Welt writes:
"Although groundwater leaks in this storage facility for low- to mid-level radioactive waste have been known since the 1960s (when it opened), along with other leaching problems over the past 20 years, and although researchers have consistently given warnings, the government has hardly bothered with the problem. Now, at long last, there are political consequences. For one thing, the Asse-II pit will be declared a 'final' storage facility (instead of an 'experimental' one). So it's proper that political responsibility should shift from the Ministry of Education and Research to the Environment Ministry. But the actual problem still isn't solved: What should become of Asse-II? It's more than unpleasant to hear that radioactive liquor is slopping around in the old salt catacombs -- which will cause no-one-can-say-how-much damage in the coming decades and centuries. Naturally the case of Asse-II will remind the public that the problem of 'final storage' has not yet been solved. Proponents of nuclear power will need to answer this challenge. So far there is no final plan to dispose of highly radioactive waste -- meaning spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants. Now as ever they are stored, still 'provisionally,' on the premises of the plants themselves."
