BENEATH a patchwork of green fields and beech forests not far from the city of Brunswick, Germany, lies an environmental time bomb. Known as Asse II, it is an abandoned salt mine used as a makeshift store for hundreds of thousands of drums of radioactive waste, dumped there during the 1960s and 70s. In 1988, groundwater began seeping through the walls of the mine as many had feared, threatening disaster.
Since then, a fractious debate has raged over how best to deal with the mine's contents. Each week, hundreds of litres of brine entering the chambers are collected and stored with the drums of waste, and the mine's structure is becoming unstable. So a decision had to be made: should engineers backfill the chambers, abandon the mine and leave the waste there in perpetuity, or should they remove it all? Both options are risky. Removing the waste will be complex, ...
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