Last nuclear waste containers return to Germany, closing 30-year reprocessing programme
Clean Energy Wire
The final containers with radioactive waste sent abroad for reprocessing have been returned to Germany, completing a process that took three decades. The last shipment was transported back from the British reprocessing plant in Sellafield to the Brokdorf interim storage facility north-west of Hamburg, according to the environment ministry.
“This transport marks the end of the chapter of reprocessing in Germany,” state secretary Jochen Flasbarth said during a visit to the storage facility. The transport of radioactive waste to Brokdorf sparked major disputes and protests in the country over several decades, and has become a symbol of the controversial role of nuclear energy in Germany.
Reprocessing of nuclear waste is a chemical process that separates unburned uranium and plutonium from spent reactor fuel so they can be recycled into new fuel, which reduces the volume of high-level radioactive waste requiring long-term disposal
Flasbarth said redistributing more than 5,000 tonnes of nuclear waste returned from Sellafield and the reprocessing plant in La Hague in France across multiple temporary storage facilities had been a key factor in defusing a major societal conflict. “The fact that this compromise has held to this day strengthens public trust in the ongoing search for a final disposal site,” he added.
The containers that arrived in Brokdorf had originally been destined for a storage facility in the town of Gorleben in northern Germany, which for decades had been a focal point of anti-nuclear protests before Germany’s nuclear phase-out agreement prompted a restart of the search for a permanent disposal site. Until a final site is found, the environment ministry in 2015 decided waste would be stored at facilities near former nuclear plant sites across the country to ensure a fairer distribution of the burden.
Germany has so far made little progress in its search for a final disposal site. A draft law by the environment ministry from earlier this year said the existing 2031 deadline for deciding on a location is not realistic. Germany shut down its last nuclear power plants in 2023, but must still safely dispose of radioactive waste accumulated over several decades. A 2024 report commissioned by the country’s Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management (BASE) said that the search for a suitable site is likely to take until the 2070s.
The nuclear power legacy continues to cost Germany substantial amounts of money, a 2025 parliament report revealed. Over half of the environment ministry’s budget in that year was earmarked for managing the country’s nuclear waste and preparing a decision for a final nuclear repository.