Previous concepts and plans

While there have been no more shipments from Germany to reprocessing plants since the 2005 amendment to the law, reprocessing waste was still stored at the corresponding facilities abroad. In accordance with their contractual obligations, the waste owners, i.e. the operators of German nuclear power plants, had to take back their waste. This, too, was consistent with the principle that each country should dispose of its own radioactive waste.

In contrast to spent fuel, the liquid intermediate- and high-level waste from reprocessing is vitrified and poured into canisters. The resulting waste products are in turn placed in appropriate transport and storage casks.

In 2015, the German government, the federal states and the waste owners agreed to no longer transport the radioactive waste cast in glass canisters to the central interim storage facility at Gorleben, but instead to on-site interim storage facilities in Hesse, Schleswig-Holstein, Bavaria and Baden-Wuerttemberg for storage until final disposal.

More current agreements, concluded in 2021 between the energy suppliers and the French reprocessing plant at La Hague, provided for the return of four casks with high-level radioactive waste and a maximum of 30 empty, internally contaminated transport casks instead of the total of 157 casks with intermediate-level radioactive waste.

Since November 2024, the four casks containing high-level radioactive vitrified waste have been stored at the Philippsburg interim storage facility. According to BGZ Gesellschaft für Zwischenlagerung mbH, the empty, internally contaminated transport casks intended for the transport cask storage facility in Ahaus, have been sent to USA for recycling.

What was sent abroad for reprocessing?

Since 2005, the transport of German spent fuel elements for reprocessing abroad has been prohibited. Until then, the operators of the nuclear power plants had shipped some 6,670 tons of heavy metal ( uranium and other metallic components of the spent nuclear fuel) to reprocessing plants and other recycling facilities abroad.

5,379 tons went to the reprocessing plant of Orano (formerly AREVA NC, COGEMA) in France, 851 tons to the reprocessing plant of Sellafield Ltd. (formerly BNFL) in the United Kingdom. The remaining quantities were either processed at the Karlsruhe reprocessing plant or, to a lesser extent, shipped to the following foreign institutions:

• for reprocessing at Eurochemic in Mol (Belgium)
• for storage at the central interim storage facility for spent fuel elements (CLAB) in Sweden
• for reprocessing or storage in Russia (only fuel elements from the Greifswald and Rheinsberg nuclear power plants that were manufactured in the former USSR)
• for further use in the Paks nuclear power plant in Hungary (only fuel elements from the Greifswald nuclear power plant).