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This used to be the crown jewel of Soviet technology. It was the pride of communist East Germany. Now it's become a nightmare. This is one of the biggest and most expensive civil decommissioning projects in the world. It's taking decades longer than planned and is going to cost ten times what it was supposed to. We're going to be spending two days in there to find out what's taking so long. And this is part of a hidden global trillion dollar problem. That's going to burden us for generations.
This is the hidden cost of nuclear power. Is that it? I think that's a big building back there. Are yeah. That's it. You can see the chimney. Yeah. This definitely looks like it was built in the 60s. We're at the north-eastern edge of Germany, right by the Baltic Sea. And this is a headache that's bigger than 200 soccer fields. "Hello." "Good morning." "Dörrer, hello." "Here we have our dosimeter." We're entering a contaminated area, so we need to strip down and change into these sexy overalls.
Kurt Radloff's parents both worked here when the plant was still active. Now he's the person handling the PR for this place. And right away, we're in the middle of the plant. "Wow, it's huge!" "Here we have the reactor shaft, where the basket containing the nuclear fuel was located. So the heart of every reactor unit."
This nuclear plant was once the cutting edge of Soviet technology. "Nuclear energy!" Germany is divided. We're in the communist-ruled east. The statues are impressive, the buildings austere, and East Germany needs energy. The coastal town of Lubmin is chosen to house the country's biggest nuclear power plant, partly thanks to its convenient location right beside cool water. The plant was supposed to provide about a quarter of the country's electricity. Unlike, she wants to stay on here. But soon.
Trouble starts after just a year. A fire in one of the machine rooms breaks out, disrupting the cooling system. Multiple further critical problems are not reported to the public. But in 1989, the Wall falls. And for the first time, West German inspectors have a look at the reactors. And they really don't like what they see. Multiple pressure vessels containing the nuclear fuel were brittle. The emergency cooling and backup electricity system was woefully insufficient. The reactor is deemed not safe, and experts recommend an immediate shutdown.
All five of the plant's operational reactors are powered down. Five years later, decommissioning starts. And this is what it looks like now. "Is everything here contaminated?" "We assume that there is contamination here. We measure [the radioactivity], if it's above the threshhold, we need to remove futher layers. It's very time-consuming." There are strict regulations about how long you can stay inside these halls. You can't eat or drink - or go to the bathroom.
"35 years have passed since the shutdown, and it still looks quite full here?" "We have removed the major components, so the pressure vessel and its components." After the power plants are shut down, the most radioactive parts, the nuclear fuel rods and everything around them, are removed first. The rods have to be left to cool down in the world's least fun pools, and are then placed in interim storage. This process alone can take years. In this case, it was seven. "We've done a lot of preliminary work to even just be able to start the decontamination process." But that was the easy part.
330,000 tons of material still needs to be measured for radioactivity and dismantled. You need to take out every door, pipe and cable. Bit by bit. And then they're sent to where we're going next. The decontamination factory. Because the problem with radiation is that you can't neutralize it. Nuclear fuel, classified as high level waste, can continue to be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years, and needs to be locked away until it's no longer a threat.
The components closest to the fuel, like parts of the pressure vessel, have been activated. Which means that they were exposed to radioactivity long enough that they themselves emit radiation. These are classified as intermediate level waste and can't be decontaminated either, so they too need to be stored away safely. But the parts that were further away from the fuel can be decontaminated. For that, you need to sort them by material and then separate off the radioactive layers. "We have multiple decontamination areas, like the dry blasting booth or the high-pressure water blasting booth."
This way you can dramatically reduce the volume of waste that needs to be stored for the coming centuries. The easiest to decontaminate is loose surface contamination, which you can just wipe or wash off, but that's also very dangerous to get in contact with, since it's well, loose. Then there is fixed contamination. This is when radioactive material is chemically or physically bonded to the surface, for example, when it's corroded. To get rid of that, you can either leach or strip it off using chemical baths, blast it off with granulate, or really high-pressure water, or - like blackheads - peel it off with radioactivity removing foams or gels.
"This looks like it's been blasted." "Exactly. It's been worked on. You can see that on the surface. And this one hasn't been blasted yet." Then every piece of equipment needs to be cut down to the size of these boxes "About the dimensions of a Euro pallet, 1.20m [4ft] by 80 cm [2.6ft]. Everything that's supposed to leave this location must fit into it." Once it's all been double checked for remaining radiation, the decontaminated material can finally be put into a skip - or in rare cases even recycled. All the materials that were used to decontaminate, - like the granulate or the water used to blast off radioactivity - need to be stored away, safely.
"So this is put into interim storage?" "Yes, it's put in interim storage where it then can be prepared for final, permanent storage." According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, the whole process of decommissioning is supposed to take 15 to 20 years. But the problem is that in a lot of cases, many things just don't go according to plan. Like in this hall. "This is the Special Building 1. We're in the upper part. [Radioactive] control water was treated here during operations." But there was an unpleasant surprise hiding in this building.
"We know that there's quite a lot of contamination down here in the corner. If there was a crack in the plaster somewhere, which probably wasn't uncommon before 1990, it seeped into the cracks and spread from there. We saw before that a normal dose rate is 0.1, 0.15, maybe 0.2 microsieverts per hour. It's under 0.2 now. But if we go here. It's much higher." "Oh wow, that's almost continuous." "We're at about 10 microsieverts per hour. That's contamination where I'd say we maybe should move a meter away.
We shouldn't stand or lie here for an hour. " Every inch of this building needs to be checked for radiation and any contaminated concrete shaved or hammered off layer by layer. "You can see here that hammers were used. That's why the wall is so uneven, that's where contamination was detected. This is one of the most difficult buildings to decontaminate and dismantle." This isn't unusual. Leak contamination is also a problem with other old reactors, often delaying the process and increasing costs.
Other obstacles can be limited space for waste, changing safety standards, technological complexity, funding gaps, or public opposition. Here, everything was supposed to be finished ten years ago, costing €1 billion. But plans have changed. "We anticipate that the dismantling of these old facilities will likely take until at least the mid-2040s. We estimate the total cost for the entire site at approximately €10 billion." The company is currently building new facilities to be able to dismantle big contaminated components like the pressure vessel.
Cleaning those up could take another 20 to 30 years. "So I want to know whether this kind of cost overruns and delay is unusual." The majority of the world's reactors are old. Hundreds of nuclear power plants are going into retirement in the coming decades. The current average lifespan of a plant is about 30 to 40 years. The problem is that even though we've had nuclear power for over 70 years, we've only finished shutting down a tiny fraction of our reactors. Of the over 600 ever built and connected,
about a third have been shut down. But only this fraction, around 20 of them, have actually been fully decommissioned. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates that it costs about 500 million to 2 billion USD to decommission one reactor. And several reactors have been successfully decommissioned, more or less within budget. Overruns of Lubmin's magnitude are unusual, but many other projects have run over budget and are taking much longer than initially expected. Same goes for plants in the UK or Japan. Meaning that, globally, this could become a trillion-dollar problem - even without significant cost overruns.
Most countries make the companies that run nuclear power plants save money for decommissioning while the plant is operating. These funds are usually kept in special accounts and monitored by regulators. If the money isn't enough, governments often step in to cover the gap like in the UK or in Eastern Europe. This is also what happened here. The plant was owned by the East German government, and the ballooning cost has to be covered by today's taxpayers. And we haven't even reached the last step of this process: storage.
Germany doesn't have any permanent storage site for nuclear waste yet. That's why everything is currently kept in a building that we're not allowed to film the outside of - for security reasons. "I hope we get in." Entering is even more complicated than in contaminated areas. The lower and intermediate level waste, which is 95% of the total waste here, is supposed to be sent to a permanent storage site in central Germany that's currently being built. As for the high level radioactive waste,
there are no concrete plans for where to store it yet. "Do you believe that you will live to see all of this dismantled and stored away?" "As far as low- and mid-level radioactive waste is concerned - I really hope so. I eat healthily, so I think I could manage it if the current plan works out. But with high-level waste, it's not going to happen - unless medicine makes significant progress." And this isn't just a German problem. Only two of the 31 countries producing nuclear power are currently building a permanent storage site for high-level waste. So the fuel rods are going to have to sit around for a long, long time.
"How did they envision the dismantling process when they originally built the power plant?" "The dismantling of the nuclear power plant wasn't really part of the original plan. They really didn't think about that during the planning stages of these power plants." This is something that is changing. Newer power plants are built with decommissioning in mind. Compared to older reactors, the designs are often more standardized and, in some cases modular, making them theoretically easier to take apart. But since none of that has happened yet,
it's hard to say whether that will significantly shorten the process or reduce the cost. "Frontal scan. 5.4.3.2.1. Thank you." "Lucky!" This plant and its legacy will keep this generation and the next busy. "Thanks for watching. If you like this video, please subscribe for more videos like this."
