Nuclear waste sparks Germany election frenzy

The top candidate of a main political party in Germany has made the shutdown of the country's old nuclear power stations as a condition for joining a coalition government following September's election.

“The Green party will not sign any coalition contract that softens the withdrawal from nuclear power. On the contrary, we will insist that older nuclear power stations are shut down ahead of schedule,” Green party's Jurgen Trittin told the Bild daily on Sunday.

His remarks come as a recent report by Germany's Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) questioned the safety of a controversial nuclear waste dump facility, widening the divide within the country's coalition government.

The report published earlier this week deemed the salt-mine nuclear waste storage facility in Asse as one of the most unreliable nuclear waste dumps in use after officials found a major radioactive water leak.

Earlier this month, a fire at one of Germany's oldest nuclear power stations in Hamburg forced the reactor to shut down, blacking out most traffic lights in the German port city and interrupting the water supply to thousands of homes.

The two incidents have brought the controversial issue to the forefront of the political debates ahead of the September polls.

German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel is leading the anti-nuclear front that demands the speedy shut down of the country's nuclear power, a position shared by the majority of Germans according to an April poll.

Even very low container leakage and radionuclide migration rates are cause for serious concern as some radioactive species have half-lives longer than one million years.

That is why nuclear wastes must be shielded for centuries and isolated from the living environment for millennia.

"On September 27, Germans will decide whether this and seven other reactors can run longer, as [Chancellor Angela] Merkel ... wants, or if we can finally switch off ... eight of these difficult reactors," Gabriel told German television.

Chancellor Merkel supports the use of nuclear energy until renewable energies become fully commercially viable, deputy government spokesman Thomas Steg told reporters in Berlin in response to Gabriel's comments