Germany Still Searching for Nuclear Waste Site as Finland Leads With First Final Repository

Four hundred meters beneath an island in western Finland, next to one of the country's two nuclear power plants, sits the first approved final repository for radioactive waste anywhere in the world. It took around 40 years to complete. Finland is now alone in having reached this point, and every other nuclear nation, Germany included, is still waiting for its own answer.

The scale of the problem is wide. Some 31 countries operate or once operated nuclear power plants, and the first large-scale plant went online in the Soviet Union in 1954. Seven decades later, the question of where the waste should finally go remains largely unresolved. Most experts have long agreed that spent fuel elements, which stay radioactive for many thousands of years, belong deep underground. Agreeing on the principle has proved far easier than finding a place for it, since hardly anyone wants to live near such a site.

Germany has been looking for almost ten years. The Federal Company for Radioactive Waste Disposal, known as BGE, was created for the task, and this week it announced that only 5% of the country's land area remains under consideration. That territory is spread across 11 of Germany's 16 states. The agency is consulting geologists, nuclear experts and physicists, as well as citizens and politicians. One thing is already settled: the waste produced during decades of nuclear power will stay in Germany.

Most of it sits where it was generated or close by, at the 19 former nuclear power plants now being decommissioned and at several research facilities. Germany decided in 2011, after the Fukushima reactor disaster in Japan, to end the commercial use of nuclear energy, and the last plant shut down in 2023. The waste, though, remains in interim storage.

The selection process works by elimination. Sites are first judged on geology: whether the rock will stay stable at 400 meters, and whether groundwater could become contaminated. The aim is a repository wrapped in a rock layer about 100 meters thick as a natural barrier, in clay, granite or rock salt. As requirements tighten, candidate sites fall away. Factors such as proximity to large cities enter only much later.

Germany hopes to name a site by 2050. Environment Minister Carsten Schneider of the center-left SPD wants to examine whether the search can be sped up. Ministry spokesperson Stephan Gabriel Haufe told a regular government press conference this week that Russia, the United States, the United Kingdom and Japan have not advanced their procedures as far as Germany has. Finland, he said, is making the fastest progress worldwide, but Germany is among the leading countries.

BGE spokesperson Dagmar Dehmer points to the length of the safety case. A repository must be shown to stay safe for 100,000 years in Finland, and for one million years in Germany, Switzerland and France. Whatever the horizon, she said, the work is enormous, requiring analysis of how geology and technology interact over time and how radionuclides decay. Part of her job is building public trust, and she believes Finland has managed it. She described high trust in government there and called the regulator, STUK, one of the country's most respected institutions. Germany, she said, can learn by staying consistent, avoiding frequent changes of direction and showing patience.

Money is part of the picture. The search and the storage of waste at former reactor sites cost around €1.4 billion ($1.6 billion) each year. Experts put the finished repository at roughly €14 billion ($16.4 billion), and if all goes to plan it will permanently hold 28,000 cubic meters of waste. For now, Germany's task is to narrow the 5% further, and to decide whether 2050 can be brought closer.