Greenpeace: Shipping German Material to SRS Would Be Illegal

Greenpeace Germany is claiming that the proposed shipment of German highly enriched uranium to the Savannah River Site for processing would be illegal, the advocacy group said in a legal opinion released Monday. At question are 900 kilograms of HEU in the form of graphite spheres from the pebble bed AVR gas-cooled research reactor at Germany’s Juelich Research Center. “Greenpeace Germany views the proposed export with the utmost seriousness in terms of its clear non-compliance with both domestic German and European law. The German state, committed to a phase out of nuclear, is legally responsible for managing its own nuclear waste,” Greenpeace Germany Executive Director Brigitte Behrens said in a Jan. 26 letter to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Environmental Management.

 

No final decision will be made on accepting the fuel until a final environmental assessment is issued this summer, according to DOE officials. DOE has asked the German government for a legal analysis on the export of the material, according to Greenpeace Germany, which has released its own legal opinion on the matter. “We urge you to take our lawyer’s opinion into account and to cancel plans for the export of nuclear waste spent fuel from the AVR Juelich to the United States,” the letter states.