Having apparently outwaited its opponents, the research reactor near Munich in the southern German state of Bavaria is set to turn on late this summer and could be running at full power within a year.
The FRM2, as the reactor is known, had sat finished but fallow for about two years on the Garching campus of the Technical University of Munich. As the first reactor in years built to burn highly enriched uranium (HEU), it has attracted concern at home and abroad about nuclear proliferation (see Physics Today, March 1999, page 78). Now, although the reactor will start up using HEU, Germany’s federal government has stipulated that it be converted to a lower enriched uranium fuel before 2011.
Ironically, it fell to the antinuclear Social Democratic—Green coalition government to give the FRM2 the green light. Incremental permits had been issued by the previous government, says Jürgen Maass, a...
