Germany restarts hunt for nuclear waste dump

After 36 years of political feuds and citizen protests, Germany has gone back to the drawing board in its hunt for somewhere to store its nuclear waste.

A contentious 1977 decision to deposit high-risk nuclear waste in a salt mine in the state of Hesse will be rescinded after government and opposition lawmakers in Berlin agreed to start the search for a new site.

Federal environment minister Peter Altmaier said agreement to find a new site "resolves amicably the last controversial topic in the atomic age".

The preliminary agreement, likely to approved by the Bundestag in July, empowers a committee of experts to identify a shortlist of sites by 2015. A final decision is to be taken by 2031 and the facility has to be built by 2040.

As part of a push to renewable energy, Germany aims to switch off its last nuclear power plant by 2022. About 28,000 tonnes of radioactive waste will by then still be without a permanent home.

Since West Germany’s first nuclear reactor went online in 1960, authorities have stored spent nuclear elements and other radioactive material in three provisional, above- ground sites in the country.

Spent fuel rods are transported out of the country each year for reprocessing.

The 1977 decision to store waste in a salt mine in Gorleben, 125km southeast of Hamburg, was made without public consultation and prompted decades of protest.

The passing decades raised questions about the rural site: once near the inner-German border, Gorleben is now in the centre of a reunited country. Fears were raised, too, about the stability of the salt mine as a permanent home for the waste, which will remain radioactive for at least 200,000 years.