The proposed shipment of a batch of German highly enriched uranium to the Savannah River Site would violate both German and European law, according to a complaint Greenpeace Germany filed yesterday with the European Commission attempting to stop the plan. The 900 kilograms of U.S.-origin highly enriched uranium comes in the form of graphite spheres from the AVR gas-cooled reactor at Germany’s Juelich Research Center. The Department of Energy and German government are proposed processing the material at the H-Canyon facility. However, the activists claim the shipments would violate laws requiring waste generated in Germany to be disposed of in that country. “We know the plans were illegal under German federal and state law, this legal opinion confirms that German plans to dump nuclear waste on the people and environment of South Carolina also violates international law,” Heinz Smital, a Greenpeace nuclear expert, said in a statement yesterday. “Germany must deal with its own nuclear waste in Germany – the plans to export to the U.S. must be scrapped.”
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