Gorleben

Gorleben
Municipality
Location of Gorleben within Lüchow-Dannenberg district
Ortsteile
Government
• Mayor	Herbert Krüger
Area
• Total	21.25 km2 (8.20 sq mi)
Elevation	20 m (70 ft)
Population  (2021-12-31)[1]
• Total	599
• Density	28/km2 (73/sq mi)
Time zone	UTC+01:00 (CET)
• Summer (DST)	UTC+02:00 (CEST)
Postal codes	29475
Dialling codes	05882
Vehicle registration	DAN
Website	www.gorleben.de

Gorleben 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

, however, Gor means "mountain") and leben ("heritage").

Gorleben is known as the site of a controversial

. 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

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

.

Originally, more projects were planned by the nuclear energy industry, for example a

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.^[2]

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

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.[2]

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.^[2]

Gorleben long-term storage project

The salt dome under the ground near Gorleben was intended to become a long-term storage place for all kinds of radioactive waste. On the site, the German Society for the Construction and Management of Long-Term Waste Storage Units (DBE mbH) runs what is known as a "pilot plant", which previously was planned as a long-term storage site for highly radioactive nuclear waste. This plan has been abandoned.

In the past, however, this use was extremely controversial and it has been finally decided to not follow through with a final repository in Gorleben. The preliminary choice of Gorleben as a site was made in 1977 by the

]

Whatever the location, the basic choice of halite (rock salt) as a host rock for a final repository was a step which eliminated from the start any alternative locations such as the clay or granite formations favoured in other countries for this purpose. Specific exploratory geological drillings were carried out between 1979 and 1999, and from the early eighties the results showed that the Gorleben salt dome could actually be unsuitable because of its unstable roof rock and contact with the groundwater.^{[citation needed]}

One example of this instability is the "Gorleben Rut", a gully made by melting glacial ice which runs as low as 320 m below the surface directly above the dome. The gully is composed of sandy, gritty material which conducts groundwater. This means that the roof of the dome, expected to be several hundred metres thick and made of heavy Oligocene clay layers, does not exist in this form at this spot.^{[citation needed]} According to the German Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) this is the minimum required for any location to be suitable as a final repository, following their definition of a "multi-barrier system". These clay layers have been destroyed from below by the diapir of the salt dome as it was forced upwards by tectonics, and from above by material being carried away and filled in by Ice Age glaciers.^{[citation needed]}

Another discovery made by the exploratory drilling was that saliferous groundwater moves both from the sides and the top of the salt dome towards the surface, meaning that if it came into contact with highly radioactive material, the result would be a contamination of the

]

In 2010, Angela Merkel's center-right Federal Government lifted the moratorium and restarted the exploration process. Large-scale protests promptly resumed.^[3]

Pilot conditioning plant

Near the exploratory mine and the interim storage hall, there is still a "pilot conditioning plant". Here, tests are to be made of conditioning the fuel elements in order to store them in a deep repository, and also to reload the containers for the

.

Dispute

Even while the interim storage unit and the first exploratory mine were being set up - the latter was once referred to by

locally and nationwide.

On 23 May 1980 a

), spoke out in support of the occupiers. On 4 Jun 1980 the police moved in and cleared out the encampment.

Today, protests still take place against nuclear energy and the plans for waste disposal at Gorleben: they reach a climax in the yearly transport of dry cask containers by rail and special lorries through northern France and Germany to the interim storage unit. For the last few years, this transport has usually been carried out in November; it is accompanied by a huge police presence. The Greenpeace ship MV Beluga is near the entrance to the proposed permanent storage site as a form of ongoing protest and memorial.^[4]

In November 2008, a shipment of radioactive waste from German nuclear plants arrived at a storage site near Gorleben after being delayed by large protests from nuclear activists. More than 15,000 people took part in the protests which involved blocking the route with tractors and blocking trucks with sit-down demonstrations.^[5][6]

The municipality of Gorleben and the Gartow administrative association both receive annual "compensation" payments known as Gorleben-Gelder (Gorleben funds). The nuclear industry and most of the

, also support further exploration of the site with no search for alternative locations, and following this the use of the Gorleben salt dome as a national or even international final repository for highly radioactive nuclear waste.

See also

• Bundesamt für Strahlenschutz
• Radioactive waste
• Dry cask storage
• Anti-nuclear movement in Germany
• Wyhl

References

Much of this article was translated from the German language version of April 10, 2006

External links

• Photos of 1997 protests Archived 2016-08-25 at the Wayback Machine
• Description of Gorleben programme by Society for Nuclear Service
• Germany forces nuclear waste underground