Safety issues or mock attacks?
On the "scandal" at the BfS expert workshop
So what is true now? Do the safety issues with regard to the planned Konrad repository really exist and have to be taken seriously or are they only used as an excuse on account of the project being basically rejected, irrespective of the licence granted?
Aerial photography of Konrad 1
In the form of the region’s appeal to the federal government, the political claims have been known for months. They contain the central demand to ensure that the licence is up to date – in technical terms: Verification according to the state of the art of science and technology. The facility operator, the BfS, invited a number of experts in exactly this issue in order to discuss in a professional man-ner the available concept on how to proceed. Besides, the BfS has expanded the circle of invited experts by representatives of the communities and citizens initiatives.
However, instead of contributing to the discussions about safety issues, the city and citizens’ initiatives demand that the known political claims be read out. This is refused by the operator, indicating that the expert workshop is the wrong place for this. What follows is a trained and anticipated staging of outrage; discussion of contents is rejected. However, about 100 experts from all around the Federal Republic hold this debate intensively and objectively. The correct address for the claims would have been the politicians and not the BfS as operator of the facility.
What remains is the impression of a region that obviously just pretends to claim safety proofs but actually only wants one thing: No repository. Should this be the case, the representatives of the city and the citizens’ initiatives ought to be verbalising it instead of proclaiming alleged safety defi-ciencies without making one single factual contribution. The people living in the region do not de-serve such mock attacks.
State of 2016.04.29