It has taken 35 years for German federal and state politicians to agree to look again at where to site a permanent storage facility for German nuclear waste. An agreement has now been reached that will allow the search to go ahead, but details remain unclear.
All parties had agreed on the draft of a bill, which could pass the Parliament before the end of the year. It stipulates that a commission comprising 24 members from both politics and civil society should examine which sites would be suitable for the storage of radioactive waste. So far, the waste has been kept at the interim site at Gorleben in the northern German state of Lower Saxony.
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