Qualla: Asse II mine

Asse II mine: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wusel007 at German Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0. The barrels were not meant to come back out. That was the design, not an accident. Between 1967 and 1978, more than 125,000 drums of radioactive waste went down a shaft in a wooded ridge southeast of Wolfenbüttel, and the salt around them was supposed to do the rest: creep shut, seal them in, hold them for longer than any steel container could. The drums were only ever certified safe for the journey there. Germany now intends to bring every one of them back to the surface, starting in 2033.

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Image: Wusel007 at German Wikipedia | CC BY-SA 3.0

Asse II mine: Why Salt Seemed Like the Answer

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit wusel007, CC BY-SA 3.0. Asse II was sunk between 1906 and 1908 to a depth of 765 metres, working potash first and then rock salt until 1964. What remained was a large, dry, worked-out void in a salt dome, and in 1965 the state-owned Helmholtz Zentrum München took it over for the Federal Ministry of Rese...

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Image: wusel007 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Asse II mine: What Went Down the Shaft

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wusel007, CC BY-SA 3.0. The inventory was reviewed again in August 2008, after public speculation about what was down there: 125,787 drums of low-level waste emplaced between 1967 and 1978, mostly at the 750-metre level, with a declared total activity of 1.8 × 10¹⁵ becquerels. Around half came from the ...

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Image: Wusel007 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Asse II mine: Rolled Off the Embankment

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Brix, Public domain. In the early years the barrels were set down in orderly rows with space between them, so inspection remained at least theoretically possible. That is not how most of the waste arrived. Once the volumes grew, drums were rolled off a salt embankment into the chambers and each laye...

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Image: Stefan Brix | Public domain

Asse II mine: The Mountain Is Moving

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wusel007, CC BY-SA 3.0. At Asse II the overlying rock mass moves 15 centimetres a year, and decades of tunnelling left so many voids that the pressurised salt is losing stability — softening, in the engineering reports' language, through creep deformation, plasticity effects and fracture under ground pr...

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Image: Wusel007 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Asse II mine: Getting It Back Out

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Brix, Public domain. In 2008 press reports revealed brine contaminated with caesium-137, plutonium and strontium, and politicians accused the operator of failing to inform the authorities. On 8 September, Lower Saxony and the federal government replaced Helmholtz Zentrum München with the Federal Offi...

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Image: Stefan Brix | Public domain