Горлебен: История, Радиоактивные Отходы и Природа Вендланда

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 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.

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".

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.

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.

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 vitrified waste blocks into containers suited to long term storage. The dry cask storage containers themselves are not suitable for long term storage and can not be placed in the salt dome for technical reasons. However, at present the plant may only be used for repairing damaged containers, according to an agreement signed by the German government.

Even while the interim storage unit and the first exploratory mine were being set up the latter was once referred to by Jürgen Trittin (Green party) as illegal mining there were protests by opponents of nuclear technology locally and nationwide. On 23 May 1980 a micronation, the "Free Republic of Wendland" was founded symbolically by building a village of huts at the site of the exploratory mine. Gerhard Schröder, then the leader of the SPD youth organisation Jusos (later to become Chancellor of Germany), 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. 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. 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 CDU and FDP political parties, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, 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.