The job of cleaning up after 40 years of uranium mining is one of the
less attractive tasks that faces reunited Germany. Plans to flatten the
radioactive slag heaps and fill in the tunnels that riddle the landscape
of the Erzgebirge region are slowly taking shape. Meanwhile the local people
are left to consider a future without the region’s largest employer.
Until the end of the 1980s, East Germany was the world’s third biggest
producer of uranium ore after the US and Canada. Now, the demand for German
uranium has dried up. The end of the Cold War has brought an end to the
stockpiling of nuclear weapons, and nuclear power plants in the east have
been closed because they fail to meet safety standards in the new Germany.
The Wismut AG mining operation, originally run by the Soviet Union and
then as a joint East German-Soviet enterprise, has blighted an area of 1000
square kilometres. Hundreds of slag heaps, some as big as the surrounding
hills, dot the landscape. These must be levelled or covered with soil and
regrassed. Some 1600 kilometres of mine workings between 90 and 2000 metres
deep must be filled in or flooded, and more than 300 shafts and tunnels,
85 ventilation shafts and 18 waste ponds must be decontaminated and closed
off or reclaimed.
While plans are being drawn up to divide up the mammoth task, representatives
of the Soviet and German governments and officials from Wismut are negotiating
the Soviet Union’s withdrawal from its half of the enterprise.
‘The project is huge,’ says Klaus Martinoni of Germany’s Federal Office
for Radiological Hygiene in Munich, ‘perhaps bigger than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.’
Estimates of the cost of cleaning up and closing the mines range from 2
billion Pounds to 5 billion.
The residents of the mining towns, many of whom are now unemployed,
are growing increasingly impatient with the authorities. New jobs for the
miners will materialise only if companies move in from outside the area.
Most are discouraged by media reports of high levels of radioactive contamination,
and are likely to invest in the region only if the area is thoroughly decontaminated.
‘What we need now is a factual picture of the dangerous places and to
discover what is and isn’t dangeorus,’ says Walter Rohnsch, the coordinator
of government investigations in the region, who worked previously for East
Germany’s National Board for Atomic Safety and Radiation Protection.
Added to the problems of uranium is radon, which is found in pitchblende
and other uranium ores. The level of radiation in some homes is as high
as 100,000 becquerels a square metre. Scientists say that the radon may
not be the result of Wismut’s operations, but of earlier mining activity.
Since the Middle Ages, miners have dug for silver, nickel and cobalt.
When they brought up pitchblende containing uranium they wrote it off as
useless and dumped it in slag heaps. Later, people built their houses over
old mine shafts and on the slag heaps.
According to Rohnsch, the reorganisation of local and federal authorities
after reunification has delayed efforts to clean up the region. A joint
East-West commission began to discuss the various approaches to cleaning
up in 1989. But the upheavals within government and at Wismut mean that
it is still impossible to assign projects or funding for the reclamation
work. ‘The administrative reorganisation has prevented us from working through
the plan in an orderly fashion. Everybody wants to help, but we don’t yet
have a budget,’ said Rohnsch.
Wismut wants to play a part in the massive cleanup because it will keep
at least some of its employees in work. Officials from Wismut admit that
their credibility is low, but they stress that the company has expertise
that will be invaluable.
‘In the Federal Republic, they’ve got little experience with uranium
mining,’ said Siegmar Richter, who is in charge of Wismut’s radiological
studies in the region. ‘Over there (in western Germany) the biggest slag
heap related to uranium mining is about 170,000 cubic metres. Here in Ronneburg,
we’ve got one that’s 130 million cubic metres.’
