Inside a 1960s industrial hall on Germany’s Baltic coast, radiation worker Florian Grose clicks a dosimeter against his chest and it starts to shriek as he approaches a corner. In his protective overalls he notes the reading: about 10 microsieverts, compared with a typical background level below 0.2 microsieverts. He warns that you shouldn’t stand or lie there for an hour.
The building is part of Lubmin, a former Soviet-era nuclear complex in what used to be East Germany. Its interior walls are scarred where crews have chipped away layers of concrete trying to find and remove contamination. Kurt Radlof, the plant’s communications officer, calls the structure among the hardest to decontaminate and dismantle. What was meant to be a two-decade project after shutdown has stretched on for decades and become one of the costliest civilian decommissioning efforts in the world.
Nuclear power has been used for more than 70 years. Of the more than 600 reactors ever built, only about a third have been shut down and roughly 20 fully dismantled. Many reactors operate for 30 to 40 years, and hundreds are approaching retirement. At the same time, some governments are reconsidering nuclear as they seek more secure, low-carbon electricity. At a recent Nuclear Energy Summit, the European Commission president urged a renewed role for nuclear to complement intermittent renewables amid geopolitical uncertainty.
But closing plants is neither simple nor cheap. The International Atomic Energy Agency estimates decommissioning a single reactor can cost up to $2 billion. Even without major overruns, the global bill for shutting reactors, storing interim waste and finding final disposal could reach into the trillions — a burden likely to fall on taxpayers and future generations.
Lubmin’s troubles began early. Built to draw cooling water from the Baltic and supply a large share of the GDR’s electricity, the plant suffered a serious machine-room fire about a year after startup that impaired essential cooling. After reunification, West German inspectors found brittle pressure vessels and inadequate emergency systems and ordered the five reactors closed.
Decommissioning is more like surgery than demolition. First the fuel and its immediate surroundings are removed and stored in cooling pools; at Lubmin that step alone took seven years. Highly radioactive material remains hazardous for many thousands of years and requires secure storage. After fuel removal, every pipe, cable, door and structural element must be measured and often dismantled by hand. Lubmin’s cleanup involves about 330,000 tons of material. Some waste goes to long-term storage; some items can be decontaminated and recycled after inspection; much stays in interim facilities until a permanent repository is available.
Unforeseen problems drive costs and delays. At Lubmin, radioactive water used during operations seeped into plaster and spread contamination inside walls, forcing workers to strip surfaces layer by layer. Changing safety standards, limited storage capacity, technical complexity, funding shortfalls and local opposition commonly add years and billions to budgets. Lubmin was once expected to finish roughly a decade ago for about €1 billion; current estimates approach €10 billion, with completion pushed into the mid-2040s.
Operators are usually required to set aside decommissioning funds in advance, but when those reserves fall short governments and taxpayers often cover the gap. Permanent disposal remains the larger unresolved issue: of 31 countries that produce nuclear power, only two are building permanent underground repositories, and Germany has none. Much of Lubmin’s waste still sits in interim storage — a final site Radlof jokes he may not live to see.
New reactor concepts, including small modular reactors, claim easier decommissioning through standardization and modular design. But none of the new designs have yet been through the decommissioning process, and only two SMRs have been built at commercial scale, so the projected cost and time savings remain unproven.
Lubmin highlights a key lesson: for many early plants, dismantling was an afterthought. As governments consider new nuclear builds to strengthen energy security, they must factor in the long, uncertain and expensive tail of decommissioning and the urgent need for permanent waste repositories if they want to avoid passing massive cleanup bills to future generations.