Re the article "Phantom of a bomb" of Süddeutsche Zeitung of 12 July 2011, the BfS makes the following statement:

The previous operator of the Asse II mine who had been responsible for it until 31 December 2008, the Helmholtz Zentrum München, handed over a documentation about waste emplacement to the Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS). Basically, this documentation does not state where and for what purpose the wastes were produced originally that were emplaced in the Asse mine until 1978. It is fact that also uranium was emplaced in the Asse mine. On the basis of the existing documentation, the BfS is not in a position to answer the question as to whether parts of the material were produced in the process of developing a nuclear bomb.

The BfS had been transferred the operator’s responsibility by the federal government in January 2009. Among others on account of the existing uncertainties with regard to the emplaced inventory, the BfS has been carrying out a so-called trial phase prior to retrieval, during which e.g. the wastes found in two representative emplacement chambers are examined in more detail. According to current knowledge, no high-level radioactive wastes were emplaced in the Asse mine.

Documentation of the delivered wastes from the first emplacement phase

The emplacement documentation handed over to the BfS by the former operator Helmholtz Zentrum, is not in compliance with the current waste acceptance requirements for a repository. In particular the documentation of the first emplacement phase in 1967 lacks important information as to the content and origin of the wastes.

Example: Waste dispatch note (“drum card”) from the year 1967

For example, as a rule, the drum cards from this time contain general information about the content (e.g. "scrap" or "ash") and the immediate deliverer (such as e.g. Wiederaufarbeitungsanlage Karlsruhe, Abteilung Einengung Bau 553). More detailed information about the content of the wastes such as the nuclide inventory etc. do not exist in the majority of the documents; the same applies to information about potential third parties where the radioactive materials had originally been used or produced. Also, waste was taken to the Karlsruhe Research Center by third parties and from there taken to the Asse mine for emplacement.