Here’s a job I wouldn’t want: driving the same 105 miles of German highway, at night, 152 times, with a police helicopter watching you do it. That’s basically the gig a nuclear trucking contractor signed up for last year, and as of this week the count stands at 26 down, 126 to go.
The cargo is one steel cask per trip. Inside each one are up to 1,900 graphite balls from a pebble-bed reactor that shut down 38 years ago, and the whole convoy exists because the building those casks sat in for three decades lost its license and nobody could get it back.
So let’s go through one night, and then the math on the other 126.
One cask, one night, 105 miles
The 26th run left the Jülich research campus, west of Cologne, on the night of October 21. According to the anti-nuclear activists who track every one of these convoys on a live ticker, 18 police vehicles rolled out of the gate at 10:35 p.m. as a forward convoy, and the truck itself followed at 10:40 p.m. with a police helicopter overhead and 36 more police vehicles behind it. That’s 54 vehicles for one truck, if you’re counting, and I am.
The same ticker had the helicopter over Ahaus at 1:20 a.m. and the cask inside the storage hall at about 1:40 a.m. on October 22. Three hours, door to door, for 105 miles of mostly autobahn. The police close each stretch of highway as the convoy comes through, so for everybody else on the road it’s a rolling detour in the middle of the night.
Police in Münster have put out a note after most of these runs, and the note for the 23rd, a week earlier, has the most action in it. On the night of October 13, three people climbed a bridge over the A31 near Schermbeck with a banner, two of them on the outside of the railing, and the police took all three into custody, pulled traffic off the highway for a while and got the cask to Ahaus at 2:47 a.m. For the 26th, the protest was a handful of people at vigils in Jülich and Ahaus, by the activists’ own account.
Frankly, that’s a pretty big change from how this started. The first convoy in March had around 100 vehicles, a helicopter and roughly 2,400 police officers on duty, according to German press reports, and police counted about 380 demonstrators in Ahaus that night.
By October the escort was down to 46 vehicles on the 25th run and 54 on the 26th, again per the activist count, and the protest was down to a dozen or so people. Twenty-six repetitions of anything will do that.
What’s actually in the cask?
If you picture spent nuclear fuel as long metal rods, that’s the wrong picture here. The AVR at Jülich was the world’s first pebble-bed reactor, and it ran on graphite spheres about 2.4 inches across, a shade bigger than a billiard ball, with the uranium baked inside as thousands of tiny coated particles.
The reactor ran from 1967 to the end of 1988, and we covered what happened to the reactor vessel itself, which got filled with concrete and driven 2,000 feet down the road to its own purpose-built hall. This is the fuel’s turn.
Jülicher Entsorgungsgesellschaft für Nuklearanlagen, the government-owned cleanup company everyone calls JEN, puts the exact count at 288,161 fuel pebbles plus 124 moderator spheres, packed into 152 casks of a type called CASTOR THTR/AVR. German officials round that to about 300,000.
Each cask holds a maximum of 1,900 pebbles, and dpa reports the fuel inside a full cask adds up to only about 4.4 pounds. The rest of the weight is graphite and steel.
And there’s a lot of steel. A loaded cask weighs about 60,000 pounds, according to dpa, and the special semi carrying it comes in just under 290,000 pounds with the cask on board. You get one cask per truck, and that’s the whole reason this takes 152 trips.
Why not just run a few trucks together and knock it out in 50 nights? The regulator’s permit does let police bundle transports into convoys.
As far as I can tell from German press reports and the activists’ own tally, that hasn’t happened yet, and bridge load limits along the route have been floated as the reason. I can’t confirm that part independently, so take it as the going explanation rather than an official one.
152 casks, 26 done, and a permit that ends first
The federal nuclear waste regulator, BASE, issued the transport license on August 25, 2025, and it runs through August 31, 2027. The first cask reached Ahaus on March 25, 2026. By early July, the count was five.
By early October it was 21. Then the pace picked up to roughly two a week, and that’s how the count went from 21 to 26 in about three weeks.
Run that math forward and you’ll see the problem. On October 7, Silke Krebs, the North Rhine-Westphalia state secretary for economic affairs and energy, told a state parliament committee that at the current pace the 152 casks wouldn’t all be in Ahaus until August 2028, a year past the permit, according to the regional broadcaster Antenne AC.
Orano NCS, the nuclear logistics company running the trucks for JEN, had already applied to BASE over the summer for a one-year extension. A JEN spokesperson’s explanation for the application, quoted in German press, was that an extension gives everyone a buffer.
My own back-of-the-envelope version: at two casks a week with no holidays, no breakdowns and no helicopter problems, 126 casks is about 63 weeks, which lands in early 2027. The state’s August 2028 estimate assumes a slower average, and given that this operation managed 21 casks in its first six months, I’d argue the state’s number is the realistic one. The activists tracking the convoys have logged two trips that were delayed or scrubbed by technical faults on the truck, so breakdowns aren’t hypothetical.
Why Jülich has to be emptied at all
This’ll sound strange if you’re used to how US plants handle spent fuel. The casks aren’t moving because Jülich is unsafe in any way the operator has admitted to. They’re moving because of paperwork, and specifically because of an earthquake nobody expects.
JEN’s own explanation goes like this. The Jülich cask store opened under a 20-year license that ran out on June 30, 2013. When the operator applied to renew it, the regulator asked for proof the building could ride out an extreme earthquake with a return period of 100,000 years, a much tougher standard than the one the hall was built to.
That proof never came together, so on July 2, 2014, the state’s nuclear supervisor ordered the fuel out of the building. It’s been sitting in a hall without a valid license ever since, while the government figured out where to put it.
Three options got studied: build a new hall in Jülich, drive the casks to the existing interim store in Ahaus, or ship them to the United States, where the uranium came from in the first place. The US plan involved the Savannah River site in South Carolina, and JEN says it was dropped in October 2022. Ahaus won because it already had a license to take the Jülich casks and already holds 305 casks of the exact same type, full of pebbles from a second German pebble-bed reactor that closed around the same time.
So Germany is spending 152 police operations to move the fuel from one interim store to another interim store, 105 miles apart, with the final repository still unbuilt. You can see why the activists call it pointless. You can also see the regulator’s side, which is that Ahaus has a license and Jülich doesn’t, and in nuclear law the license is what counts.
The American angle
Pebble-bed fuel isn’t a German museum piece. X-energy’s Xe-100 reactor runs on the same basic idea, graphite spheres with coated uranium particles inside, and the company’s fuel plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, just topped out a building sized to press 700,000 pebbles a year. Nobody in the US has had to move pebble fuel at this scale yet, mostly because nobody’s made it at this scale yet.
When that day comes, the American version probably won’t look like 152 police convoys. The Department of Energy has spent a decade and about $33 million building a 12-axle railcar called Atlas for exactly this kind of job, and its first real cask is due to ride from Virginia to Idaho in late 2027.
Rail or road, though, the Germans are learning the same lesson the US is about to. Moving the stuff is a logistics and policing problem long before it’s a physics problem.
Back in Jülich, the next convoy is likely within days. Orano’s extension request was still pending as of the state’s October 7 update, and the 26th cask arrived in Ahaus at about 1:40 a.m. on October 22, with 126 still sitting in the hall in Jülich.
