Standing in a 1960s industrial building on Germany’s Baltic coast, radiation worker Florian Grose holds a dosimeter that begins to beep loudly as he moves toward a corner. “That’s around 10 microsieverts,” he says in protective overalls; a normal dose rate is under 0.2 microsieverts. “You shouldn’t stand or lie here for an hour,” he warns.
The building is part of the former Soviet-era Lubmin nuclear complex in what was East Germany. Parts of its walls are pockmarked from workers hammering off concrete layers to find contamination. Kurt Radlof, who handles communications for the plant, calls it one of the “most difficult buildings to decontaminate and dismantle.” Dismantling Lubmin, scheduled initially for about 20 years after shutdown, is still far from finished and has become one of the world’s most expensive civilian decommissioning projects.
Nuclear power has been around for over 70 years. Of more than 600 reactors ever built, only about a third have been closed and only 20 fully decommissioned. Reactors typically run 30–40 years, and hundreds are approaching retirement. That looming wave of shutdowns comes as some governments in Europe and elsewhere consider expanding nuclear capacity to bolster energy security after recent global crises. At a recent Nuclear Energy Summit, EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen argued Europe should join a “nuclear renaissance,” saying nuclear could complement intermittent renewables amid geopolitical risks.
But decommissioning is expensive and technically demanding. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates removing a single reactor can cost up to $2 billion (€1.75 billion). Even without major overruns, cleaning up shuttered plants globally could become a trillion-dollar burden on taxpayers and future generations when interim storage and final disposal are included.
Lubmin’s problems began early. Built for easy access to Baltic cooling water and intended to supply a large share of the GDR’s electricity, the plant experienced a serious machine-room fire after about a year in service that disrupted essential cooling. Further problems were not publicly reported. After the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, West German inspectors were allowed inside and found brittle pressure vessels and inadequate emergency cooling systems. The five reactors were ordered shut for safety reasons.
Decommissioning a nuclear plant is more like surgery than demolition. First the most radioactive parts — fuel rods and their immediate surroundings — are removed and cooled in pools. High-level waste remains radioactive for tens to hundreds of thousands of years and must be moved into secure storage. At Lubmin that fuel removal alone took seven years.
What follows is painstaking: every pipe, cable, door and structural component must be measured for radioactivity and dismantled piece by piece. Lubmin’s cleanup involves roughly 330,000 tons of material. Some contaminated items must go to long-term secure storage; others can be decontaminated and, after checks, may be recycled. Much material ends up in interim storage pending a final repository.
When things go wrong, costs and schedules explode. At Lubmin, radioactive water used during operations seeped into cracks in plaster and spread contamination through walls — an unexpected complication that forces crews to remove affected surfaces layer by layer. Changing safety standards, limited waste-storage capacity, technological complexity, funding shortfalls and public opposition commonly add time and expense. Lubmin’s original plan was to finish about a decade ago for roughly €1 billion; current estimates approach €10 billion, with completion expected in the mid-2040s.
Most countries require operators to set aside decommissioning funds in advance, but when those funds prove insufficient, governments and taxpayers often must fill the gap. And decommissioning is only part of the problem: high- and intermediate-level waste needs permanent disposal. Of 31 countries currently producing nuclear power, only two are building permanent underground repositories; Germany has none. Much of Lubmin’s waste remains in interim storage awaiting a permanent site — a prospect Radlof quips he likely won’t live to see resolved.
New reactor designs, including small modular reactors (SMRs), are being developed with decommissioning in mind: standardized components and modular structures that should be easier to take apart. But whether that will shorten timelines or lower costs is unproven. None of the new designs have yet gone through decommissioning, and only two SMRs have been built at commercial scale.
The experience at Lubmin illustrates a broader lesson: dismantling was often an afterthought when early plants were designed. “The dismantling of the nuclear power plant wasn’t really part of the original plan,” Radlof says. As governments weigh new nuclear builds to secure energy supplies, the long, uncertain and costly tail of decommissioning — and the need for permanent waste repositories — must be factored in to avoid passing massive bills to future generations. Edited from a DW Planet A video by Jennifer Collins.
