Gorleben

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.