The plant was not broken and it could absolutly be turned back on. They would just need to catch up on some delayed maintance.

Nuclear 'waste' has plenty of solution and all these 'but the repositoy' is just what anti-nuclear people use to scare people that don't know any better. Nuclear 'waste' doesn't need a repository, its perfectly fine to just store it above ground for as long as needed.

The Asse mine is completely irrelevant to the discussion as this is not how anything is done anymore for a long time and many countries have proven capable of managing waste fine, including Germany since then. The fact is, basically nobody has died from waste managment.

Asse risk is overplayed, even if nothing was done, the likelyhood is that in the next few 100 years nobody would die because of it it. They are removing it because maybe in a few 100 years there could be a slight impact on ground water. Even the is if you make some worst case assumtions. Spend the billions it would cost to empty the mine on gold and put it into the ground. People in few 100 years can dig up and spend on what they think is their most important problem. In the incredibly unlikely case that its radiation, they can use their technology to do what they think is best.

Again: How can it be turned on, when it is actively decommissioned ("Rückbau") since 2024?

What are the costs (without omitting storing radiactive waste securely[1] above ground for some thousand years ? Are they less than batteries + solar + wind?

[1] think terrorism, drone strikes, ...

Terrorism and drone strikes are irrelevant. Casks can withstand train/rocket impacts.

It can be turned on by pursuing refurbs like Darlington in Canada which would be closest conceptually since a lot of stuff got replaced there. Refurbs would be cheap vs building anything new providing same TWh/year. Germany needs much more than just batteries. It needs gas firming on top (coming from Habeck, Fraunhofer and now Reiche)

Maybe we have a slightly different understanding what it means if the gp says "it could absolutly be turned back on".

I certainly wouldn't have expected that someone would propose to shop around for refurbished parts (including to try to get permission to create a german-canadian-chimera-npp).

For me "it could absolutly be turned back on" is tied to "if refurb is done for affected components"

I'm sure Framatome will be more than happy to help with manufacturing of necessary parts. Great carenage is already undergoing in France which helped in this regard but Framatome is involved in manufacturing for other suppliers too

Dozens of above ground areas need to be secured for thousand of years.

Great if there would be no way for terrorists to get into just one of these facilities in this timeframe and get their hands on radioactive material to build a dirty bomb.

Great if this would be cheaper than just build solar, wind and batteries without the liability of radioactive waste.

"Dozens of above ground areas need to be secured for thousand of years." - why? Do you think for terrorists it'll be easy to dig a 500m deep hole to reach Onkalo's sealed facility? Instead of creating some chemical agents that can do vastly more damage for much cheaper? For real some of you live in a fantasy world. Nor you seem to be concerned about facilities like Herfa Neurode in this regard.

"Dozens of above ground areas need to be secured for thousand of years." - why?

Well, you were replying to a reply of me to panick21 where he said:

  Nuclear 'waste' doesn't need a repository, its perfectly fine to just store it above ground for as long as needed.

So I suggested that there could be a problem with terrorism when there are a lot of decentral storage sites above ground. To which you said it would be irrelevant.

If there are easy and cheap longtime-solutions to the radioactive waste problem - fine with me. In Germany we certainly don't have them at the moment.

I think it will be easier and cheaper to avoid this kind of waste altogether and use batteries, wind and solar.

You can store it on site for as long as the site is operational which means(if you allow extensions/relicensing) about 80-100y. Afterwards you need a repository similar to Herfa Neurode or Onkalo.

The cheapest way in Germany would be either to allow storing in Herfa Neurode or to send waste to la Hague for recycling, sell the recycled part and isolate only the leftovers.

Renewables don't isolate you from this problem. Germany still needs a repository for medical and research waste. Germany also needs repositories for toxic chemicals (arsenic, cadmium, lead- byproducts of various industries including renewables)

Even more, Germany can't get by with solar+wind+bess alone. Fraunhofer ISE recommends massive gas expansion to 80+GW to firm renewables. I'd rather see any fossils infrastructure erased from existence. France doesn't need a parallel fossils firming grid. Nor Sweden.

Alone the costs for transport are exorbitant.

Here [1] is an example for planned transports of 152 CASTOR casks containing around 300,000 fuel element pebbles from Jülich to Ahaus: The lowest estimate (excluding security) is 150 Million Euros.

So electric energy in the past was cheap by using NPPs. The energy companies made massive profits. Now, decades later we have to pay for it and will have to continue to do so for centuries. (As always: privatize profits, socialize the costs)

I would like to take these 150 Million and buy some batteries...

[1] Sorry, german language: https://www.zeit.de/politik/deutschland/2026-03/radioaktiver...

Not that exorbitant. Npp operators are paying for dismantling themselves (except soviet/experimental units). Waste storage (Interim/final) was paid too through KENFO which is massive and agreed by all parties, incl greens. I guess this transport will be financed from that fund too.

Germany could recycle all that waste at la Hague, build a repository Like Onkalo and still have leftover money. If for some reason KENFO isn't enough, chiefs of BMUV and BASE should be investigated For treason and wasting public money. Germany could even deal with this cheaper by allowing storing the waste at facilities like herfa neurode. This would also solve storing waste from medical and research sectors

yes, you can do refurbs which arent that expensive.

Nuclear waste storage is politically killed centrally. Look even at formulation in the law which demands "best" location. Germany could solve this problem in a second if it allowed storing waste in facilities where toxic chemicals are stored like Herfa Neurode.

Asse was an experimental facility that didnt have a plan of what to do if experiment goes sideways. It has nothing to do with final repositories like Onkalo. Still, it killed noone. Nor will it. Most of the waste there is from medical and research sectors and is LLW.