London (Platts)--10Apr2013/718 am EDT/1118 GMT

Germany's nuclear power operators are not ready to bear the estimated Eur2 billion ($2.6 billion) cost for identifying and building a new nuclear waste depository, the German Atomic Forum said Tuesday after the federal government reached a compromise with states and opposition parties to re-open the search for such a site.

According to a statement, the nuclear operators will honor the agreement to pay for the cost of a nuclear waste depository. Accordingly, some Eur1.6 billion was already spent in the development of the underground storage site at Gorleben, it said.

There is, however, no legal basis for the nuclear operators to bear the extra cost of the search for an alternative solution before a final judgment about the suitability of the Gorleben site has been made, the nuclear lobby group said.

The lobby group also welcomed the announcement by the federal government that the provisional site at Gorleben will remain an option for a permanent solution.

A cross-party commission has been tasked to identify a suitable site in Germany by the end of 2015. The relevant legislation will be pushed through parliament before the summer break, the environment ministry said, while the facility itself is not expected to be operational before the 2030s.

Nuclear waste storage has been a controversial issue in Germany over the last 20 years. Exploration at the Gorleben site started in 1979 with the aim of setting up a permanent underground storage site.

However, the suitability of the former salt mine as a nuclear waste depository has been questioned and work at Gorleben was halted after a coalition between Social Democrats and Greens brought in the first nuclear exit bill in 2002 until 2010, when the current government under Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to extent the running times of Germany's nuclear reactors.

However, the Fukushima nuclear crisis in March 2011 prompted the government to shut down older reactors immediately and to phase-out nuclear power generation permanently by 2022.

The German Atomic Forum is the lobby group for nuclear plant operators in Germany. The remaining nine nuclear power plants are operated by E.ON, RWE and EnBW.

--Andreas Franke, andreas_franke@platts.com
--Edited by Maurice Geller, maurice_geller@platts.com

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