ESK statement taken into account in BfS plans

The statement of the Waste Management Commission (ESK) on the retrieval of the radioactive wastes from the Asse mine contains nothing new for the Federal Office for Radiation Protection. The points contained therein are known and have already been included in the BfS planning. The open questions as regards content and state of the wastes were already mentioned by the BfS itself. They are the object of the phase referred to as fact-finding which has just been tackled, i.e. drilling into and opening two emplacement chambers. For the responsible Federal Office it goes without saying that the radiation protection principles have the highest priority for the employees and the population.

Now, Mr Michael Sailer gave a statement on the retrieval of the Asse wastes on the occasion of the annual meeting of Deutsches Atomforum e.V. It is not known to the BfS what had encouraged the ESK Chairman to make evaluations that were neither dealt with nor decided by the Federal Environment Ministry’s Advisory Board. According to "Braunschweiger Zeitung", he states the following: Since the change of operatorship of the Asse mine 15 months ago, "nothing had been achieved apart from initiating a licensing procedure". His evaluation of the current state and the activities carried out since the change of operatorship to improve the safety of the Asse mine, would perhaps have been more accurate if he had visited the mine previously. On the occasion of his last visit to the Asse mine a year ago, he inscribed the following in the visitors’ book of the information centre – five months after the Asse had been taken over by the BfS: "It was good to see that a whole number of things now look considerably better than last year."