Town & Country Planning May/June 2018 231

In the flat middle reaches of the Elbe River in theplains of Northern Germany lies the ‘Wendland’, aperipheral region of sturdy traditional farms andvillages, arable land, forest, heaths and waterland,an area sparsely populated and distant frommotorways and big cities. On a straight countryroad bordered by forest and close to the Elbe isGorleben, an unremarkable, peaceful village with a most remarkable recent history.

Here, hidden in the nearby woods and ringed byguarded security fences, are two industrial sites. On one site are the headworks, offices and ancillarybuildings that serve an excavated salt dome850 metres below ground, for long explored as theprospective geological disposal facility for Germany’shighly active radioactive wastes. Nearby is anothercomplex comprising an interim store for vitrifiedhigh-level wastes, a low- and intermediate-level

nuclear’swastelandspart 5 – gorleben, thepower of the peripheryIn the fifth of a series of articles on the local and social legacies ofnuclear energy, Andrew Blowers considers the conflict over thenuclear waste facilities at Gorleben, which proved pivotal to the end of nuclear power in Germany

Aerial view of Gorleben and the surrounding area

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waste store, and a mothballed pilot conditioningplant for preparing wastes in a suitable form for finaldisposal. Although peacefully secluded now, themine and the store have been the focus of the mostfiercely contested struggle over nuclear energy inGermany, lasting over 40 years. The conflict overnuclear waste at Gorleben ultimately engulfed thewhole country, culminating in the phase-out of nuclearenergy in Germany. The power of the peripheryproved decisive.

In this tranquil land there is still visible evidence ofthe struggle that has now subsided. On roadsides, invillages and in fields and on farms in the surroundingregion, yellow wooden crosses are encountered,the emblem of Gorleben’s protest. On walls and onthe tall electricity substations graffiti and slogansare daubed, proclaiming ‘Stop CASTOR’, referring tothe huge containers that carried wastes to theinterim store. Among other slogans, now fading, are‘Ausstieg’ (‘Climb down’) or ‘Wir stellen uns Quer’(roughly, ‘We make our stand’), belligerenttestimony to the determination of protesters.

In a roadside clearing close to the mine is theastonishing site of a ship, the Beluga, once used byGreenpeace for protests, now erected on dry land togreet workers, protesters and visitors. A history ofanti-nuclear protest is posted in an open-air display,while in a clearing there is a wooden building, aninformation centre and a place where regularservices are still held. The spirit of the Gorlebenmovement appears indomitable and persistent.

In the middle of Germany, in the middle

of nowhere

Wendland is a historical and cultural construct. Itderives from the Wends, a Slavic tribe who settledin the area during the late Middle Ages, part of thecriss-crossing movement of peoples typical of theboundless and borderless North German Plain. Intruth little is known of this peasant community of‘tillers and herdsmen living in small villages andraising corn, flax, poultry and cattle’.1 Yet, centurieslater, the notion of Wendland has been appropriatedby a movement dedicated to defending the integrityand identity of its territory against the disruption andrisk of an unfamiliar and dangerous intruder.

The reinvention of Wendland was made vaguelypalpable by the invention of its iconic flag, a startlingorange pointed sun on a deep green field (shown onthe map on the next page), and through the issuingof passports to the Republik Freies Wendland (theFree Republic of Wendland). Its territorial extent was ill-defined and the map on the next page isindicative. Nonetheless, the idea of a nuclear-freeWendland gained traction, inspiring an incipienttourist industry to promote a land of ‘peace andseclusion and pure nature’ and to prepare a bid forits traditional landscape and buildings to become a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

232 Town & Country Planning May/June 2018

Wendland’s cultural identity exists within a sharedterritorial integrity. On its northern side it is boundedby the Elbe, while the border with the former EastGermany continues round its eastern and southernsides. The landscape of the eastern part is thewaterlands of the Elbtalaue and the forestedheathlands, while to the west the agriculturallandscape is dotted with traditional ‘rundling’villages with their pie-crust layout.

The Wendland is roughly co-terminous with theLandkreis (county) of Lüchow-Dannenberg. Once aborderland, now, as Peter Ward, a manager at themine puts it, Wendland is ‘in the middle of nowherein the middle of Germany’. When the salt mine wasidentified as potentially suitable for a deep repositoryin the 1970s, its peripheral situation of remoteness,low population and underdevelopment seemed tomake it a suitable choice. Without comparative siteevaluation or public engagement, in a classic exercisein ‘DAD’, Gorleben was ‘decided and announcedand defended’, with one side defending the nuclearcomplex, the other rising in defence of theircommunity.

The battle for Wendland

Over the years, the conflict over Gorleben hasebbed and flowed. In the early period, first on theborder, then, after reunification, an internal periphery,Gorleben gradually developed its central position inGermany’s nuclear politics. As Susan Matthes ofGreenpeace described it to me in 2014, ‘For manyyears the only place was Gorleben. It was the endof the world.’ The conflict was confrontationalalmost from the outset and, over time, becameincreasingly uncompromising. It was played out

Iconic symbols of Gorleben's protests

Photos: Andrew

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Town & Country Planning May/June 2018 233

against competing and shifting discourses beingshaped by and shaping vicissitudinous power relations.

From the outset the Gorleben movement wasable to mobilise resources – political, economic andsocial – that rendered an anti-nuclear discoursemainstream and normative. By contrast, pro-nuclearinterests, after their initial incursion and establishmentof their presence in the Wendland, eventually becamemarginalised, defensive and ultimately defeated. Theresources available for deployment by the protagonistsshifted over time in favour of anti-nuclear interestsas the conflict over Gorleben escalated into a farwider conflict over nuclear waste and eventuallynuclear power in Germany. But, for Gorleben, theconflict is not yet over, victory is not yet complete.

The Gorleben anti-nuclear movement had itsfoundation and fountainhead in the community. Itslocal leadership included a Green MP, an MEP, acount who had refused to surrender his land to themine, and a pastor, as well as environmental activistsdrawn to the area. Local citizens and activists wereable to mobilise under the aegis of the Burgerinitiativen(BI), a network of local groups set up as part of aneffort to expand citizen participation in politics.2

The Lüchow-Dannenberg BI devoted itself to thenuclear issue and to Gorleben specifically. With awide local membership it engaged in consciousness-raising, networking and organisation, and was theideological inspiration of the movement. Anothervital group were landowners and farmers, adding aconservative but combative approach, fearful thatthe nuclear presence might harm the image of theirproduce and intent on maintaining stewardship ofland and forest. The farmers provided practicalsupport, blockading roads with tractors, crops andmanure in effective disruptions.

Then there were supporters from beyond theWendland, from cities like Hamburg, radical and

willing to engage in actions and demonstrations.The anti-nuclear protests could also draw onregional and national environmental groups.

The Gorleben movement, with its multifariouscomposition, displayed leadership, determination,organisation and resilience, together with an abilityto weld together disparate and cross-cutting groupsintent on a single purpose. The protests were on thewhole peaceful but forceful, adopting the full panoplyof tactics, including rallies, lobbying, demonstrations,marches and sit-ins, supported by pamphlets,petitions and displays of the iconic flag of FreeWendland. Occasionally, a more militant elementwas attracted in actions attempting to blocktransports of nuclear casks into Gorleben.

The pro-nuclear interests drew their strength fromeconomic and political sources. The nuclear industrypromised jobs and investment in an underdevelopedarea. It provided direct financial support, the so-called‘Gorleben Gelder’, and indirectly supported theeconomy through taxes and wages. The workforce,though mainly skilled, was never large, and, accordingto workers I spoke to, they felt threatened, ‘likefootballers coming onto a playing field where theopposing team has been playing for some time’.Throughout the conflict, the industry was unable toprovide a strong enough presence, and its influencediminished over time as its position weakened bothlocally and at national level, leaving its workersinsecure.

Politically, the nuclear interests could draw on thesupport of local councils keen to support the projectfor the economic incentives that it would attractfrom the federal government. Even so, the strengthof political support varied among councils at local,county, regional (Land ) and federal levels, often onparty-political lines. The pro-nuclear interests were aloose assemblage of industry, workers and politicians,

Site of the underground laboratory for exploration of deep disposal of high-level wastes

© John H

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with wavering support from federal government andultimately no match for the organised, flexible andfocused forces ranged against them.

The dynamics of the periphery go some way toexplaining the outcome of the conflict. The peripherallocation and underdevelopment of the region exerteda pull on an industry being pushed to find a suitablelocation. At the same time, the community at theperiphery found the social and political leverage topush back the invader and eventually pull in externalsupport to halt the project.

With substantial political support at federal andLand (Lower Saxony) level, a mine and an interimstore were established. But the local communitydrew its strength and self-consciousness by revivingits cultural identity to defend its traditional valuesagainst modernity in the form of nuclear technology.It was not simply a conservative reaction; it was,too, a rather proactive response – an expression ofenvironmental politics, a claim for local democracy,a rejection of risk, and a campaign for a sustainableenvironment.

The triumph of protest

During the 1970s the federal government wasseeking a site in the state of Lower Saxony for anIntegrietes Entsorgungskonzept (Integrated WasteManagement Concept) – a combination ofreprocessing plant, waste processing and conditioningfacility, and a deep geological repository. The searchwas pre-empted when the Premier of Lower Saxonyidentified Gorleben, which became the only site forthe project. There is an absence of data about theselection, and in Peter Ward’s view ‘No one knowsthe real reason why Gorleben was chosen in thefirst place’.

This was a time when protests against nuclearpower were large scale and sometimes violent ascommunities ‘reacted as if they had been handed arattlesnake’.3 In some cases, as at Wyhl in South WestGermany in 1975, the mass protests contributed tothe abandonment of nuclear projects. In the absenceof public and stakeholder participation and a closed,exclusive and elitist decision-making process ofinstitutional expertise, the contest over nuclear energybecame inevitably confrontational. As John Dryzekand colleagues explain: ‘The environmental movementin Germany therefore encounters passive exclusionin which opportunities for formal political inclusionare limited and unconventional challenges togovernmental authority have been strongly resisted.’4

The first major action was a long trek fromGorleben to Hannover to a mass protest estimatedat 100,000, which gathered in March 1979 at theGorleben International Review at the time of theaccident at Three Mile Island. In response, theproposal for a reprocessing plant was withdrawn, andthe failure to find another site led to the abandonmentof reprocessing elsewhere in Germany and reliance

234 Town & Country Planning May/June 2018

on La Hague (France) and Sellafield (UK).5 Withreprocessing eliminated, a critical part of theEntsorgungskonzept was forfeited, and opponentscould focus on the other remaining two componentsof the project. For the first decade or so, their targetwas the mine, where various actions were staged,mostly peaceful, others more intimidatory, and allpursued with characteristic inventiveness.

By the mid-1990s attention switched to the interimstore and attempts to prevent the giant CASTORflasks filled with high-level wastes being transportedto Gorleben from La Hague in France. The annualprotests against the transport were most spectaculararound the turn of the century, with large numbersof protesters intent on disrupting the railways andblocking the roads matched by green uniformedpolice deployments armed with water cannon, riotgear, helicopters, and tanks. As one protester,Thomas Hauswaldt, observed to me at one of thedemonstrations: ‘In November, everywhere theleaves have fallen. But, in our forests the leaves arestill green – there are so many police.’

By the early years of the new century it appearedthat the objectives of the Gorleben movement hadbeen achieved. The Red-Green (Social Democrat-Greens) coalition in federal government passed theAtomic Energy Act of 2002, which reflected aconsensus achieved on nuclear policy. Under thisthere would be:● a gradual phase-out of nuclear power;● the abandonment of reprocessing once the

contracts with France and the UK had been fulfilled;● construction of interim spent-fuel stores at power

plants; and● a review of nuclear waste policy.

As a consequence of the review, exploratory workat the Gorleben mine would be suspended forbetween three and ten years and, in view ofcontinuing protests, shipments of casks to Gorlebeneven from France and the UK eventually ceased.

The Gorleben conflict had now become intertwinedwith the wider conflict over the future of nuclearenergy in Germany. With the reversion to a morepro-nuclear CDU/FDP (Conservative/Liberal) coalitionin federal government in 2009, proposals to slowdown the phase-out of nuclear energy kindledspectacular protests across the country during 2010-11, including a 120 kilometre human chain of120,000 people linking two power stations andpassing through Hamburg. There were demonstrationsat other power stations and in major cities, and ahuman chain and rally in Stuttgart. Gorleben, too,became swept up in the national protests when an estimated 50,000 demonstrators came to theWendland to rally against nuclear power. Withforgivable hyperbole, Anika Limbach of AntiAtomBonn,told me: ‘In Germany never before and afterwards hadthere been mass demonstrations of this dimension.’

Town & Country Planning May/June 2018 235

The opposition covered a broad spectrum, andopposition, already heavily against any further nuclearpower, became almost universal in the aftermath ofthe Fukushima accident in March 2011. The FederalChancellor, Angela Merkel, took due note of thepolitical weather and, two months after Fukushima,announced a phase-out of nuclear energy by 2022and ushered in the Energiewende, an energytransition committed fundamentally to renewablesand energy efficiency. The policy had been informedand justified by an Ethics Commission which arguedthat nuclear energy had ‘poisoned [the] atmospherein society at large’ and, accordingly, the focus must be on energy supply ‘that dispenses with nuclearpower as soon as possible and that promotesGermany’s path towards a sustainable developmentand new models of prosperity’.6

A new beginning?

Gorleben, for long on the periphery, had beenswept up into a broader conflict. The moratorium atthe mine had been lifted in 2009, although it wasvirtually under siege from the vigorous protests intenton disrupting the resumption of exploratory work.The reprieve was brief, and in 2012 the mine wasshut and left in a condition of care and maintenance.After more than three decades of struggle, all thatremained of the Entsorgungskonzept was amothballed conditioning plant, a closed interim

waste store, and a shut-down salt mine. The triumphof the Gorleben movement was, almost, complete.But while nuclear energy faced its demise, itslegacy of wastes remained. And while the Gorlebenmine was closed, it had not yet been finallyabandoned, and so its continuing presence couldnot be entirely ignored in the search for a solution to the problem of the long-term management ofhighly active wastes.

The geography of the legacy of wastes inGermany is complex, a product of incrementalpragmatism and premature opportunism. Someprojects, deemed unsafe, have been abandoned.

A low-level waste repository developed near theold border in Morsleben in the former GermanDemocratic Republic is one of several facilities,including power stations, that were closed down andare undergoing decommissioning post-reunification.Not far away, on the other side of the former borderin Lower Saxony, in a deep salt and potash mine atAsse, drums of low- and intermediate-level wastehave been stored. Flooding and brine seepage andthe poor conditions of drum storage make this themost serious legacy issue facing the country.Retrieval is difficult, and it would be practicallyimpossible to clear all the drums. Alternatively, if the drums are left in situ, the mine becomes animpromptu, unplanned repository where leakageswill inevitably occur at some point.

Gorleben protests, and the iconic Wendland flag

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A rather more pragmatic and planned solution inthe same region is Schacht Konrad, a very deepformer iron ore mine, where long-lived, non-heat-generating intermediate-level wastes will be buriedat a depth of up to 1,300 metres. The mine waslong mired in licensing and planning procedures andis currently undergoing conversion to a repository.

Thus Germany has three incomplete repositoryprojects all within a small region straddling the formerborder: one, Morsleben, under closure; a second,Asse, where the future is uncertain and controversial;and a third, Konrad, destined to be a permanent deeprepository. Around a hundred miles further north ofthese three sites is the now abandoned deeprepository at Gorleben. Until a long-term solution isfound, intermediate- and high-level wastes andspent fuel, including wastes retrieved from Asse orrepatriated from reprocessing in France and the UK,will be stored in interim stores at reactor sites,decommissioning sites such as Greifswald on theBaltic, research centres (such as Jülich) andpurpose-built stores at Ahaus in the north west andat Gorleben, less than a third full before closure.

236 Town & Country Planning May/June 2018

Finding a solution

With the suspension of the Gorleben mine at thebeginning of the century, the way seemed open for aconsensual approach to finding a long-term disposalsolution. An interdisciplinary expert Committee on a Site Selection Procedure for Repository Sites(popularly known as AkEnd) was established in 1999and reported to its sponsor, the Red/Green coalitiongovernment, in 2002. Its remit was to develop aprocess for finding a site for deep disposal of high-level wastes. The process would be comparative, onthe basis of a ‘white map’ of Germany, unconstrainedby specific geology or preferred location.

AkEnd’s approach was truly innovative andimaginative, based on an array of geo-scientific andsocio-economic criteria, and introducing concepts suchas ‘potential analysis’ for regional development builtupon self-realisation through citizen participation. Itsprogenitor, the late Detlef Ipsen, described it to me as‘an integrated sociological concept’, adding ‘if regionalbuilding is a process then it cannot be determined inadvance’. The whole approach was ‘a combination ofvision and volunteering’, with citizens and councils

Map of nuclear sites in Germany

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Repositoriesto be closed

SchachtKonrad

Asse Morsleben

Rossendorf

Brunsbüttel

Brokdorf

Stade

GORLEBEN

Krümmel

Emsland/Lingen

Gronau

AhausKalkar

Jülich

Hanau

KarlsteinBiblis

Obrigheim

Karlsruhe

Whyl

Philippsburg

Neckarwestheim

Mitterteich

Isar

Grafenrheinfeld

Gundremmingen

LOWER SAXONY

SAARLAND

BRANDENBURG

BADENWURTTEMBERG

NORTH RHINEWESTPHALIA

MECKLENBURGPOMERANIA

RHINELANDPALATINATE

THURINGIA SAXONY

SAXONYANHALT

SCHLESWIGHOLSTEIN

HAMBURG

HESSE

BERLIN

DRESDEN

NETHERLANDS

BELGIUM

FRANCE

G E R M A N Y

LUX.

AUSTRIA

CZECH REPUBLIC

POLAND

BREMEN

COLOGNE

STUTTGART

MUNICH

HANNOVER

BAVARIA

Greifswald (Lubmin)

Unterweser/Essenshamm

Nuclear reactors

Interim storage facility forhigh-level (heat-generating)wastes

Interim storage facility forlow- and medium-levelwastes

Underground laboratoryfor deep disposal of high-level wastes

Final repositories for low-and medium-level wastes

International boundaryState (Land) boundary

Miles

Kilometres

0

0

100

150

Grohnde

Under developmentClosed research reactor

Abandoned power station proposal

Town & Country Planning May/June 2018 237

indicating a willingness to participate in site selection.The emphasis on devolution and participativedemocracy was remarkable in the context of legalisticand rule-bound German governance. But, as AkEndcommented, ‘the civil self-organisation is not only analternative to the representative democracy, but is onlypolitically effective through and in reference to it’.7

Once published, the AkEnd report sank out ofsight, but not entirely out of mind. A decade later, inthe propitious circumstances of the post-Fukushimasettlement on nuclear phase-out, the ideas andapproach of AkEnd were resuscitated, as a newcommission was established in 2013 to developcriteria and a process for selecting a site for a ‘finalrepository mine with reversibility’.

The commission comprised 32 members in fourequal sector groups – federal government, the Länder,science, and civil society. As with AkEnd, it beganwith an entirely clean sheet, or rather a ‘white map’of Germany, in which all options were open. TheAkEnd criteria-based approach would again be usedprogressively to eliminate areas until a few sites (twoor three) would be subject to comparative assessmentthrough underground investigation to find the ‘best’site in terms of safety for a period of a million years.And the concept of applying effective intergenerationalcompensation to achieve the development potential ofthe selected region was also adopted.

There was, too, an emphasis on the need for publicparticipation throughout a staged process organisedby a new federal implementing body responsible forsite identification, since it was assumed that nocommunity would volunteer a site. The challenge wasa familiar one: to find ‘a solution that is based onbroad social consensus and can ultimately also betolerated by the immediately affected population’.8

Under the Atomic Energy Act, no site is ruled inand none is ruled out. Gorleben, though frozen, isnot yet irrevocably shut and remains a divisiveissue. The industry, in its weakened position, will bein no position to underwrite another location. AsGeorg Arens, a civil servant with the environmentministry BMUB remarked to me: ‘Site selection willbe funded by the operators but all the timeGorleben is still there. Gorleben is not officiallygiven up but everyone recognises the lowprobability that Gorleben will be realised.’

For the workforce committed to the project therewas a painful sense of loss and regret. Peter Wardsummed up the bitter feelings of defeat: ‘To tear theheart out of the project – when nobody is left whowill speak up for the project; then it is finished –whether or not it is a suitable site. A victory inconflict is never the end of the story.’

The Gorleben movement is not triumphant, butremains wary and unlikely to relax its vigilance. Itscontinuing purpose derives from the social dimensionof peripherality – that shared sense of identity, oflongstanding comradeship and common purpose

deeply embedded in the older generation and passeddown the generations. Wolfgang Ehmke, one of theleaders of the movement, summed up the struggle:‘Our resistance has never been broken. It is a little bitof a miracle that we have struggled on for more thana generation.’ It is a resistance that has resonatedbeyond the Wendland, inspiring a wider anti-nuclearmovement that has brought an end to nuclear powerin Germany and opened up the issue of how to dealwith its legacy of nuclear waste. The transformativepower of the Gorleben movement still casts its longshadow over the legacy of nuclear power in Germany.

● Andrew Blowers OBE is Emeritus Professor of SocialSciences at The Open University and is presently Co-Chair of the Department for Business, Energy and IndustrialStrategy/NGO Nuclear Forum. This series of articles is basedon his latest book, The Legacy of Nuclear Power (Earthscanfrom Routledge, 2017). This article draws on a series of visitsmade in following the course of the conflict over the last threedecades. The views expressed are personal.

Notes1 E Christiansen: The Northern Crusades. Second Edition.

Penguin, 1998, pp.27-28 (first published 1980)2 B Doherty: Ideas and Action in the Green Movement.

Routledge, 20023 R Dominick: The Environmental Movement in Germany:

Prophets and Pioneers1871-1971. Indiana UniversityPress, 1992, p.167

4 J Dryzeck, D Downes, C Hunold, D Schlosberg and H-K Hernes: Green States and Social Movements:Environmentalism in the United States, UnitedKingdom, Germany and Norway. Oxford UniversityPress, 2003, p.41

5 Subsequent efforts to find a site for a reprocessingplant were thwarted by protests, notably at Wackersdorfin Bavaria. This resulted in Germany sending its spentfuel for reprocessing in France and the UK. In 1994 therequirement for reprocessing was dropped, and thenabandoned altogether in 2002. It was the necessity torepatriate the high-level wastes from reprocessing inFrance and the UK that led to protests against theshipments to Gorleben

6 Germany’s Energy Turnaround – A Collective Effort forthe Future. Ethics Commission on a Safe EnergySupply, May 2011. English translation available athttp://stophinkley.org/EngRevu/ENERGY%20TURNAROUND.pdf

7 Site Selection Procedure for Repository Sites.Recommendations of the AkEnd – Committee on a SiteSelection Procedure for Repository Sites. AkEnd(Arbeitkreis Auswahlverfahren Endlagerstandorte, Dec. 2002, p.53. English translation available atwww.cienciaensocietat.org/upimages/File/Deliberativa_2/10-Site%20Selection%20Procedure%20for%20Repository%20Sites.pdf

8 Report of the German Commission on the Storage ofHigh-Level Radioactive Wastes. Summary. Commissionon the Storage of High-Level Radioactive Wastes, Jul. 2016, p.13. English translation available atwww.nuclear-transparency-watch.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Summary_Report-of-the-German-Commission-on-the-Storage-of-High-Level-Radioactive-Waste_EN.pdf