Qualla: Gorleben

Gorleben: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wusel007, CC BY-SA 3.0. Two shafts go down into the salt below Gorleben. The deeper reaches 965 metres; the working level sits at 840. Between 1986 and 1996 they were sunk, connected and driven out into galleries, and by January 2024 the exploration had consumed at least 2.1 billion euros, ninety per cent of it paid by Germany's electricity companies. Nothing radioactive was ever put in them. On 28 September 2020 the federal agency responsible for final disposal struck the Gorleben salt dome from its list of candidate sites, and since late November 2024 contractors have been backfilling the whole thing with salt. It is one of the most expensive holes ever dug in Europe, and it is being deliberately erased.

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Image: Wusel007 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gorleben: Silt, or Mountain

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heinz Huster, CC BY-SA 4.0. Almost nobody lives here. The municipality had 614 residents at the end of 2024, in the Gartow corner of Lüchow-Dannenberg, in the far north-eastern tip of Lower Saxony — the district usually called the Wendland. Gorleben first appears in the records of the lords of Dannenberg in...

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Image: Heinz Huster | CC BY-SA 4.0

Gorleben: Why Anyone Looked Here

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Losch, CC BY-SA 3.0. The whole region lies inside the Elbe glacial valley, the great meltwater channel that drained the last Ice Age northwards, and the flatness is deceptive — the Höhbeck moraine rises out of it like a Pleistocene island, left behind by an earlier glaciation. Underneath is salt. Sal...

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Image: Losch | CC BY-SA 3.0

Gorleben: The Casks Above Ground

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paula Schramm, CC BY-SA 2.0. Four installations stand in those woods, and the one that matters most is the least dramatic to look at: a hall. The Transportbehälterlager Gorleben holds spent fuel elements and vitrified high-level waste in dry casks that stand on a floor and are cooled by nothing more elaborat...

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Image: Paula Schramm | CC BY-SA 2.0

Gorleben: Ten Years of Not Digging

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. On 14 June 2000 the federal government and the energy suppliers agreed to stop. Exploration was suspended for a decade, from October 2000 to October 2010, while conceptual and safety questions were reconsidered — although the mine still had to be ventilated, pumped and maintained...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Gorleben: What the Overburden Could Not Do

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Signal Corps Archive from United States, Public domain. The 2020 verdict did not turn on politics. Assessors concluded that the rock lying above the Gorleben salt dome — the overburden that has to keep groundwater away from the salt for a million years — was not thick or sound enough to be relied on. Salt dissolves. The cover was the ...

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Image: Signal Corps Archive from United States | Public domain