Have you heard of Asse before? Do you know you of any similar cases from other parts of the world?

Ok, so by the look of the containers, which are barrels: Only low- and medium-level waste get stored in barrels instead of concrete casks. Which means that it's effectively almost just regular trash, but underground.

4:26 Props to the DW Planet A team for showing and mentioning the radiation level or rather the lack thereof as well as the natural nuclear radiation coming from the environment naturally.

without providing radioactivity levels, this could be blown out of proportion, it has been decaying and will continue to do so, depending on the waste, could be not as bad

Note that low level waste often contains no radioactive materials at all. This is due to very stringent safety standards, that means everything (except people, mostly) within the fence of a nuclear power plant, is, by default, classified as at least low level nuclear waste and cannot be put into municipal waste. This includes e.g. old computers, office chairs, lights, overalls, tools, shoes, floor tiles, even that sheet of paper that didn’t print properly. When we think nuclear power generates a lot of waste, we’re often misled by low level waste, that is often not actually radioactive.

They literally just dumped it lol. Didnt stack or organize or nothing. Germany is wild

Nuclear waste in steel barrels, plus salt water. That was a big brained idea to use that site.

It seems so un-German to not keep detailed records, let alone not stack things efficiently- whats going on? 😅

its a real shame that nuclear waste has so much thought put into its disposal, and then gets so much flack for it but coal power plants get to dump all of their waste into the air and regular garbage dumps like its nothing

As always Citizens and Tax payers will pay for the mess not the actual responsible organization.

This story is essential in understanding why Germans are so opposed to nuclear power.

The show Dark makes a lot more sense now. The shady nuclear dealings really are a present issue in the minds of germans.

great so if there is an emergency while people are in the van, all oxygen is in the trunk lol

Our predecessors really did not give a fuck about the future.

Yeah this issue has always been a later thing.. well later is eventually upon us

But how much is it radioactive? What is the real scope of the problem? Ground is radioactive too. Granite constantly leaks small amounts of Radon gas, but nobody proposes to remove all granite buildings

The problem with nuclear waste is most contractors and governments ignore the cost (including security) involved in maintaining and properly containing radioactive waste. I’m not against nuclear power, but any assessment which doesn’t realistically account for spent fuel waste on a 500 year horizon is a generational and environmental failure.

I have been working in this field in France, it is actually very possible to recycle nuclear waste, that was my job.

Sadly the Asse is often used as an example for nuclear waste treatment when in reality this is no longer the case in Germany where today nuclear waste is one of the if not the most safely handled kind of waste there is.

piling nuclear waste in 1964? In 1964 the us was still researching how it could work, all plants that did exist where located in the us and experimental

Very insightful, thanks.

Far better "storing" than the ones dumped in the Mediterranean.

This gives “wir schaffen das” a whole new dimension🤷‍♂️🤣

6:27 Come on I know I wasn’t the only person who seen that guy dumping barrels of radioactive waste into that pile and then proceeded to lower the The bucket from the tractor in puncher a hole into one of the radioactive barrels and liquid started flowing out from one of them at 6:27 6:27

Nuclear energy is very ecofriendly if done correctly. It got bad rap from Chernobyl disaster which was result of vatnik stupidity

So overblown. And they didn’t even see barrels on the tour. A camera with a radiation detector on a long cable can’t be lowered inside? Ridiculous

Radioactive waste from Germany was also brought to Eastern Europe...

I just realised why the journalist didn't measure the radioactivity using a Geiger Counter, to see how radioactive the waste is. This is an old Potash mine, it is already naturally radioactive. It's, possible the natural radioactivity is higher than the low and intermediate level waste, so it won't show up on a Geiger Counter, you end up detecting the Potash (which contains naturally radioactive potassium-40).

Yeah, I knew about the problem but I didn't know the specifics of the situation. I'd just heard about an underground nuclear waste storage site, in Germany, that had numerous problems like water leaking in and poor storage practices. Thank you, for helping me to better understand the problem.

Very important report thank you

It is totally crazy to me that they literally just dumped the barrels instead of stacking them neatly. You'd think that simply dumping would risk compromising the barrels and causing a leak!

I wonder if the US would go to such measures, 600ppl working there, all the time, daily monitoring, trying to keep things safe? From what I understand, the US only pays for new infrastructure, not maintenance. Hence what happened in Texas in the winter a few years ago.

This channel is freaking awesome and I sincerely appreciate quality content like this. Keep it comin'!

The road leading to the mine is part of one of my standard cycling training loops

Do you want Godzilla? Cause this is how you get Godzilla.

As someone who did protest against the Endlager and Zwischenlager in Gorleben of fucking course I know abaout that. You can visit greenpeaces first Boat, the Beluga, at Gorleben, too. There's nothing nuclear down in Gorleben and yet that mine will not be used to source salt for human consumption.

I guess they did notsee that coming

Why the fork would they just dump them instead of having them neatly stacked?

My auditory processin disorder can make certain accents rly hard for me to parse, and this is one of them; so glad for good captionin tho so i dont get too confused I cant even explain what it is rly but like when ya said "former salt mine" at the start, my APD meant i just heard "former mine" and the middle word was just gone until i rewound and listened again even closer (only noticed i didnt catch it tho bcuz youtube sucks and loads the vid and then loads the captions; assumin that no one needs them at the start of a vid ofc 9,9) I cant even pinpt what it is about how ya said former salt mine that made my brain ignore the middle word. I think its just it was said fast enuf that my brain just assumed ya mispoke or smth, as its normal to hear someone start a word wrong and then say the right word immediately. My brain just processes out the word it thinks is superfluous This is hardly the worst case of such tho, your accent is all around quite easy for me to parse; esp moreso when compared to some of the worst examples Heck, in college before i learned how to advocate for myself i got stuck twice in a row with diff Maths teachers who taught calculus and sounded like they were spkin a diff language half the time... And not bcuz of usin maths terms They had very thick eastern european accents and sadly captions dont exist in person; so i was just sat in those classes too confused and i didnt know i cud just drop the class for that reason... Id been raised to believe that if there was ever any problem, it was solely a me problem and i had to overcome it without outside help. So i just tried powerin thru and got a D both times, bringin my GPA low enuf so i cudnt get FAFSA anymore and ruinin any chance i had at higher ed

*Sabine Hossenfelder has left the chat*

Do you think there’s any turtles living down there in the water?

9:32 holy f, how could the people in charge have been so incompetent to just dump barrels containing radioactive material into this pit, damaging their seals? It wouldn't be nearly as catastrophic today if they had just properly stacked them. Saved a few Euros back in 1970, now costs billions to fix.

As a fan of Well There's Your Problem, who did an episode of what can happen when water gets into a salt mine, this looks like a future episode just waiting to happen!

As a huge fan and proponent of nuclear power; this is why people and governments are afraid. This is horrible at every level and an example of how not to do anything correctly. Omg, wtf fellas?

i didn't know of this yet, but i am 100% not surprised.

Didn't know about this storage story

Really interesting and well documented.

Would change the title since the waste is not leaking and the asse itself is also not leaking.

Doesn’t transporting the waste somewhere else create a whole new set of risks and problems in addition to those posed already present. Everyone is going to say not in my backyard but it’s already there and moving it somewhere else temporarily til they find another permanent place doesn’t make sense if they are trying to reduce the overall risk. I’m open to other viewpoints I just don’t get their position considering their interest

Always watching from Georgetown Guyana south America 🇬🇾🇬🇾🇬🇾

How you get a dam car down there

Brit here, always being compared economically and industrially to Germany and we berate ourselves relentlessly. How on earth has Germany got the marketing of ‘efficient, great engineering, eco friendly, etc’ when shit like this goes on in Europe. More like a banana republic.

"it's really warm, actually"

This is how *not* to do nuclear waste, but we are learning every day

You can see green energy shine trough pitch black night ! :D

Interesting video as usual, but could you please add subtitles too :))

The last time I heard anything about this in the US, they had decided on a permanent location out west, but the locals got cold feet and were blocking it. If we had begun using our permanent storage site, we'd probably be dealing with something like the situation described in this video.

radiactive waste underground where water could be contaminated, they needed a better solution in the first place, or atleast carefully dumb the barrels, and use metal that can last

This is like the Netflix season ,,ragnarok,, same nuclear dump struggles

No such thing as nuclear radiation. Galen Winsor blew the whistle.

Germany hid its nuclear waste in unsafe place and went on to talk going green.

This is a typically ignorant report from a reporter, the job one takes when she fails at being dog catcher. NO intermediate level waste is put in yellow drums. Neither do they contain office waste as someone mistakenly said in another comment. Intermediate level waste is stored in smaller stainless steel drums. She accidentally showed some of those drums for a few seconds. What is in those drums is typical industrial waste such as used gloves, masking tape, shoe covers, disposable anti-contamination uniforms, wiping rags and similar stuff that came out of an area controlled by a Radiation Work Permit or RWP. When work has to be done in a nuclear facility (not just nuclear power plants) in an area which might contain radioactive materials or radiation sources such as sediment settled out in a low spot of a pipe carrying radioactive water, health-physicists first survey the area, both for ambient radiation and for loose radioactive material that a worker could get on himself if he touched the contaminated surface. Hot spots are marked and then the area is cordoned off with either yellow and magenta rope or tape. An entry portal is established. This is usually just an absorbent mat taped to the floor. To do work in the controlled area, craftsmen first pull an RWP. Then they gather at the portal. Everyone strips down to their underwear (really became enjoyable when women started working in these fields :-). Then each worker dons an anti-contamination suit, commonly referred to as "anti-Cs", dons nitrile gloves and rubber low top boots. Every seam, from where the anti-C zips up in the front to the junction between the sleeves and the gloves, and the junction of uniform legs meeting the rubber boots is taped up with 2" wide masking tape. If there is likely to be radioactive water in the area, the health-physicist may specify another set of anti-Cs and in some cases, a plastic rain suit between the anti-Cs. All suited up, they step over the portal into the controlled zone. They do their work, which may or may not include coming in contact with radioactive materials. They may use wiping rags and if they're fixing something like an electric valve operator, they make have a lot of (probably not contaminated) grease to dispose of. When each worker is ready to leave the controlled area, he steps onto the absorbent pad. He removes all the duct tape, removes any head covering if used, the rubber boots, the gloves and the anti-C uniform. If the anti-C uniform is disposable, it, along with all the other waste goes into a yellow barrel. If the the anti-C is reusable then it goes into a second container which is taken to the rad laundry. At the portal are friskers, Geiger counters equipped with pancake probes which are very sensitive to even the smallest amount of radiation. Each worker checks himself over. There is usually a health-physicist watching things and is ready to help anyone who becomes contaminated. Then we put our street clothes back on and go about our business. The major US LLW disposal site in the US used to be in Barnwell, SC. Politicians got their panties in a wad and passed a law which prevented any yellow drums originating in other states were no longer accepted. Suddenly it got REALLY costly to dispose of those drums. My company was doing work at the Three Mile Island facility (for you younger readers, that's where the so-called "accident" happened in 1979. Knowing that most of the stuff in the yellow drums was not radioactive, they hired us to design and have manufactured a radwaste sorting machine. On this machine was a hopper where fork lift operators dumped the contents of the yellow drums. We designed a serializer, a gadget that took garbage from the hopper and streamed it onto a fairly high speed conveyor belt, one piece at a time. Over the belt was a large liquid scintillation radiation detector, shielded from outside radiation with a coincidence detector. When an occasional piece of radioactive material was detected, an air jet blew it off the conveyor and into another yellow drum. The inert garbage ran off the end of the conveyor into a conventional solid waste hopper which then went to the land fill. Over a fairly long term, it averaged that just about 1 in every 1,000 pieces were slightly contaminated. In other words, we cut TMI's low level "rad waste" production by a factor of 999. Most of the stuff that ended up in the yellow drum was so slightly contaminated that it could have simply been land-filled. But given the hysteria surrounding TMI at that time, the utility took no chances. I don't recall what they did with the very small number of actual radwaste drums produced every month but it ceased to be an issue. If that reporter had talked to a nuclear engineer or a health-physicist (I was both before I retired), she would have been set straight and would not have made such a fool of herself.

Like sweeping dust under the rug ahhhhh someone else's problem

1st..DW deserve a credit on this news being the world independent news broadcaster 2nd.. We knew there will be an opportunities cost being a nuclear energy country 3rd.. Humans never learn after the chenorbly Russia Nuclear disaster till today 4th.. The human suffering on radioactive side effects will be next in line in the near future 5th.. Respect nature, human will be respected or vice versa 6th.. Last nor least.. Comes 2033, this waste will remain the same coz the clean up is too dangerous and costly for human being. Thank you DW for this great documentary.

This problem is the answer of our Referendum in 1987 to become a nuclear-free nation.

Steel & salt don't go well together😬 most of those drums will have rusted open by now😬

Germany was right to ditch nuclear power with its waste issues. Their mistake was not going aggressively enough into wind and solar with battery storage.

Too many problems to handle. And all of them come at once.

This is like a scene from fallout.

leaking water with salt and the metal barrels, horrible disaster..

Germans also dump around 30K tons of waste from ore processing in Poland National park water and soil is now is contaminated by heavy metals.

As people get stupider, a couple thousand years from now, they will be digging it up with glee and use it for something in their short, glowing lives.

All this nuclear waste can be used as fuel in nuclear power plants, it just requires some modifications/upgrades to the plant.

They dumped that in a salt mine??? It was better to hire a geologist. Huge mistake!

Here we have Yucca Mountain, nuclear waste site.

Salt and steel drums with radioactive waist? What were they thinking? Everyone knows that salt corrodes steel! And they still did it!

Great piece! The way societies and politics are set now, it's pretty predictable what will happen to this site, and several others spread around the world in many nations that face similar or even worse situations. It'll stay there until it starts leaking, at which point people will be evacuated and left without their homes, they family history, their places of origin. And it'll happen this way because of what this piece has shown - even in modern affluent developed nations, the problem is that you get a string of politicians promising to take care of the problem, but never delivering it because it's too costly, and too controversial to touch once they are in power. It's a system set for failure, as is many other large scale costly problems that several nations face. So you can only let things get to a point when the problem becomes impossible to ignore. And then it's reaction and remediation, rather than prevention. You can find many parallels to this - including the one thing that might exacerbate this very issue - Climate Change. The way out systems of governance, justice, politics and whatnot works right now, in several modern democratic nations, points out clearly to the inevitability of letting things escalate to ultimate consequences so immediate measures are needed. This is particularly true for public infrastructure failure. So, and I'm very sorry to say this for the poor people who will be directly affected by this, the most likely scenario for places like that in most nations, is that they mostly depend on luck for living in those neighborhoods, and even entire cities. At some point in the future, the inevitable will happen - radioactive material will leak on water table and contaminate the environment, a large area around it will be deemed unlivable, and then people will be left to scramble to save themselves. That's if the country is in good government hands, depending on who is elected people might not even get any warnings and just find out what happened when it's already too late. And then this zone could be chosen as a dump site, if well contained, because what else could you do there? This is the whole story of places where radioactive waste, toxic trash, and dangerous stuff ends up in. People encroach on it because they don't know, or because they ignored the warnings, and then generations later others will be paying for it. Problem here is that governments, even when they are competent enough to understand the size of the problem, won't touch the thing with a 10 foot pole because it is bound to make them unpopular one way or another. If they spend the money to do it, this will have an economic impact to the nation as a whole, and people unsympathetic to the problem will complain. If they say they won't do anything, then it's the electorate worried with the problem that will attack them. It's a loss no matter how you see it. So they will knowingly or not, try to ignore it as much as possible. And unfortunately, for all the good that the principle of alternance in power can have in funcional democracies, one of inevitable consequences is exactly the type of short term thinking that stops politicians from looking at problems for the long term. Even if we pick Germany itself, there is a contradictory move right there that shows this. And it is directly related to the topic of this very video. You see, despite this very case serving as food for anti-nuclear power types to say that we cannot safely use nuclear power for energy production, the anti-nuclear movement and how it convinced Germany's government to shut down nuclear power plants operations, turning to Russia gas production instead, is partially behind the whole crisis that the country is facing now. So, premeditated reaction based policies that are fueled by FUD will often end in a worsening situation. Which in turn gives and excuse for government to be slow to take action. Which also only worsens the situation. This whole system is why I'm making the prediction that I did. It can sound a bit alarmist and radical, but there are reasons why I think it's gonna go that way. What the people in that town, the site itself, or people vouching for a rational solution need is kind of a kamikaze politician committed to solving the problem no matter what even if it costs him his career, his life and everything else. In other words - a radical. That is very much unlikely to ever be elected. Because this is a problem that the majority of people in the country can continue living their lives ignoring, turning their backs to, and living their everyday lives not really worried about it - until the worse happens. Just like Climate Change.

I wanna know how they got that Mercedes Sprinter down there 😂

Well well well, it's the Dark serie plot

type of place janemba gets created

Yes I have a book from 1978( English translation 1979) the nuclear state by Robert jungk. It's very worrying the absolute stupidity of every nuclear state.

I think the problem is exaggerated. First, we talk of low and medium radioactive waste, something such as PPE, filters, contaminated materia, that is at best dangerous for 300 years, but really just after a few decades is no longer dangerous. There is no nuclear fuel or high level waste. Second taking that waste out it will be probably more dangerous than leaving it there. Even if the mine collapses, the waste is enclosed in salt. Yes, there is problem with water that can penetrate in the soil: not a big deal, you just capture and clean it, as you would do with any other dump site. Even if water is not pumped out, its effects will be negligible, not something able to produce effects on the population. Or the chambers where the waste is can be filled with concrete (or was it already done?) to mitigate the effects. Taking it out will cost a ton of money, and can be dangerous, either for the workers that will do the job, either for the population that lives nearby that will be exposed to radiation (minimal, but greater than zero). There is really no reason to do so, take out the waste and then? Dump it in another site? Just make that site suitable for keeping the waste in it.

And vehemently pro-nuclear voices mainly from the USA (who also intersect with anti wind and solar folks) wonder why nuclear is so unpopular. Germany really screwed this up. I was appalled to hear how carelessly the waste was handled.

In the meantime: Germany speaks a lot about CO2 emission xD

Could you fill the rest of the mine with concrete and be done with it? Even if the barrels are extracted, where do you store them? Land is a limited resource. What a conundrum..

Reminding me of dark series on netflix

What is the air pressure at that depth?

And even after things like this nuclear energy is still the most sustainable.

"Leaking" is a very misleading term.

But you can't have an air conditioner...?

as a blind person I usually enjoy your videos with their voice over in English this one however is very frustrating as I assume there are subtitles but I don't benefit from these Cheers

Destruction of atomic waste through laser technology : this is what the Belgians are doing at Myrha in Mol. But feeding the laser is expensive, it requires the energy of one of the nuclear plants for the whole day.

At least you have a semi secure place to store nuclear waste. In southern italy the situation is worse. Mafia and other criminal organization has put under the ground thousand o barrel. The problem is that there's farm and houses over it. As a mafia man said "it's worse than Chernobyl"

I could have sword that Dark was fictional.

Why no criminal charges

its like that show dark

Dark show is getting real

If there is not profit to be made none will take action capitalist world😂😂😂

And they say nuclear power is good for the environment.

Am I the only one who is reminded of Netflix's "Dark"? ☢ Amazing short documentary, DW!