Nuclear plant operator's insolvency could shift dismantling costs to German taxpayers

The insolvency of an operator of a decommissioned nuclear power plant in Germany raises questions about the financial responsibilities for deconstructing the reactor and disposing of its radioactive materials, business weekly WirtschaftsWoche reported. HKG, the owner of the nuclear plant Hamm-Uentrop that was opened in 1983 and taken out of service only six years later, filed for insolvency at a court in western state North Rhine-Westphalia.

The operating company, owned jointly by major energy company RWE and several local utilities, initially had demanded about 350 million euros from the federal and the state government to cover the costs for deconstruction and disposal but failed to win a lawsuit it filed in 2024. A court in the city of Düsseldorf rejected HKG’s claim in June this year, which led the company to declare itself insolvent. “HKG faces an unchanged situation with unclear financing of the remaining deconstruction work,” said the company’s CEO, Volker Dannert. According to WirtschaftsWoche, the actual costs for dismantling the plant and storing the nuclear waste initially were gauged at 750 to one billion euros.

Co-owner company RWE said the HKG shareholders bear no legal responsibility to fund deconstruction works beyond payments they already made in the past. HKG manager Dannert said that talks with the federal and the state government had remained inconclusive, which meant that “it is now a task for the responsible authorities at the federal level and in North Rhine-Westphalia to organise the further dismantling.”

The prototype Thorium-Cycle-High-Temperature-Reactor (THTR) in Hamm-Uentrop was decommissioned after serving merely for about 16,500 hours due to technical challenges. It was sealed in 1997 and will remain so until at least 2030 to let radioactive contamination diminish before deconstruction works can begin. The process of dismantling is expected to take about one decade.

Germany is in the process of dismantling its nuclear power plants after shutting down the remaining three reactors in 2023 as part of the country's nuclear phase-out. Dismantling nuclear power stations and safely storing radioactive waste will cost Germany dozens of billions of euros, and take many decades. In 2017, Germany’s four major nuclear plant operators - E.ON, EnBW, RWE and Vattenfall - handed money earmarked for nuclear waste disposal over to the country's fund for nuclear waste management, passing all responsibilities to the state. In 2025, over half of the German environment ministry’s budget is spent on managing the country’s nuclear waste, including finding a location for a final nuclear repository.