The urgent applications against the immediately enforceable nuclear law amendment permit for the fuel element manufacturing plant in Lingen have failed. The Lower Administrative Court of Lower Saxony reported this on Wednesday.
The Court’s 7th Senate rejected the applications for preliminary legal protection submitted by a resident and an environmental association recognized under the Environmental Remedies Act. The decision is final. The main proceedings remain pending before the Lower Administrative Court of Lower Saxony.
Based on the amendment permit, the operator of the site, which has held nuclear licenses since 1979, will also in the future manufacture fuel elements for Soviet or Russian-designed nuclear reactors, similar to those found in Eastern European countries and Finland. Some of the machinery to be introduced for the necessary operational conversion at Lingen was manufactured under a license from a Russian state corporation. In the preliminary legal protection proceedings, the applicants particularly cited deficiencies in the environmental impact assessment and pointed to an irreversible manipulation and sabotage risk resulting from the introduction of machinery produced under the license of the Russian state corporation.
The court did not agree with these concerns during the limited review. It was unable to recognize a risk of manipulation and sabotage that was not sufficiently defined, among other reasons, because the Lower Saxony Ministry of the Environment countered this by including a variety of ancillary provisions in the amendment permit.
