Gorleben (German pronunciation: [ˈɡɔʁˌleːbn̩] ) is a small municipality (Gemeinde) in the Gartow region of the Lüchow-Dannenberg district in the far north-east of Lower Saxony, Germany, a region also known as the Wendland. Gorleben was first recorded as a town by the rulers of Dannenberg in 1360; there was a fort on the site. The name "Gorleben" probably comes from Goor ("silt"; in Slavic, however, Gor means "mountain") and leben ("heritage"). Gorleben is known as the site of a controversial radioactive waste disposal facility, currently used as an intermediate storage facility initially planned to serve with the salt dome Gorleben as a future deep final repository for waste from nuclear reactors. As of September 28, 2020 this is no longer the case as the entire area has been deemed unfit by 70 geologists in a national geographic survey for final repositories. It has attracted frequent protests from environmentalists since the 1970s.
Geography
The small town is directly on the left bank of the Elbe river, about 20 metres above sea level. The Elbe river landscape spreads out to the east, north and northwest, protected as the Lower Saxon Elbe Valley Leas biosphere reserve. To the south, a large area of pine forest adjoins it, the Gartower Tannen. This is the largest contiguous privately owned forest in Germany, owned by Graf Bernstorff of Gartow, and is on a large hilly area which grew out of wind-borne sand in a periglacial process. The entire region, up to the Drawehn chain of hills in the west, is within the Elbe glacial valley, the main run-off for melting glacial water from the last Ice Age. Biogeographically the area belongs to the Northeast German Lowlands. There are some interesting points of natural history including the Höhbeck terminal moraine from the Wolstonian Stage which looms up from the middle of the flat Elbe Valley as a Pleistocene "island".
Nuclear Waste Repository The name "Gorleben" has become infamous both nationally and internationally because of plans to build a national deep geological repository for radioactive waste there, along with interim storage units. The waste comes from Germany's nuclear power plants, was reprocessed in France at La Hague, and the unusable remains then sent back to Germany in spent nuclear fuel shipping casks for final storage, according to the contract with the reprocessing company, Cogema. Originally, more projects were planned by the nuclear energy industry, for example a reprocessing plant for nuclear fuel at Dragahn, to the west of Dannenberg, and a nuclear power station at Langendorf by the Elbe. However, both plans were rejected as impractical to carry out. In woods around two kilometres to the southwest of Gorleben there are four different large plants: an interim storage unit for dry cask storage, a storage unit for radioactive waste which emits faint heat, a conditioning plant and a pilot plant in a salt dome.
Interim storage unit for radioactive waste
Today in Gorleben there are two interim storage units for radioactive waste. The Gorleben transport container storage unit (Transportbehälterlager Gorleben) is used for short-term storage of spent fuel elements and for vitrified, highly radioactive waste from German nuclear reprocessing plants. The fuel elements and vitrified waste block containers are in dry casks standing in a hall above ground and cooled by the surrounding air. Permission has been granted to store 420 dry casks on the site. In April 1995, the first shipments of nuclear waste were sent to the interim storage facility at Gorleben. They included spent fuel from several German reactor sites and high-level nuclear waste from reprocessing facilities in France. The anti-nuclear movement was able to concentrate its efforts on these so-called Castor transports, creating media mega-events that would dominate national media coverage for several days.
The first transport in April 1995 included a total of just two casks but mobilized 4,000 protesters and 7,600 police; the second transport in May 1996 included a single cask coming from the La Hague reprocessing plant and required a police force of 19,000. The third transport in March 1997 included a total of six casks, and it faced 10,000 protesters and 30,000 police.
As with earlier anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s and 1980s, at Wyhl and Brokdorf, these demonstrations turned very violent. The government's handling of these protests was often seen to be disproportionate and, in 1990s unified Germany, increasingly out of place, even by the broader public.
Gorleben long-term storage project
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