CNN News:德国将关闭所有核电站 核废料处理成最大难题
Which of these nations celebrates Unity Day in remembrance of an event from 1990?
Germany, Serbia, China, or Argentina?
German Unity Day celebrates the reunification of the country at the end of the Cold War.
Germany has a unique challenge on its hands. What does it do with almost 2,000 containers of high level radioactive waste.
The country is shutting down all of its nuclear power plants. They made that decision after an earthquake and tsunami damaged the Japanese plant in 2011. The problem is that the nuclear waste that these plants produced doesn't go away. It's usually put in temporary storage near the power plant it came from. But it's very dangerous.
Scientists say spent nuclear rods are so hot they can't even be moved for several decades until they cool down, and that then, they need to be buried at least 3,300 feet underground for a million years. Oh, and the ground that houses the waste can't be watery or prone to earthquakes that could cause a nuclear leak.
Germany does not plan to export the waste to another country. Researchers there are on the hunt for a burial site in Germany. And a number of communities are fighting to keep it from getting buried near them. Assuming a place is found, another challenge is figuring out how to warn distant future generations who may have a very different language system than ours that the nuclear burial site is not something they want to explore.