Closing the Nuclear Fuel Cycle at Gorleben?

Abstract

In 1977, the village of Gorleben in the border county of Lüchow-Dannenberg was nominated as the potential site of a nuclear waste reprocessing and storage facility. This chapter argues that the presence of the Iron Curtain shaped and magnified every aspect of the ensuing siting controversy. In view of discursive patterns conceived in the 1950s that framed the border regions as areas in need of industrial development, Gorleben’s borderland location precipitated its nomination. The siting decision endowed county officials with leverage over the federal government, a newfound power they exercised along the lines of the well-established borderland lobby work. The immediate proximity of Gorleben to the inter-German border also drew the GDR into the siting dispute. Gorleben turned the periphery into the center of the longest-lasting anti-nuclear protest in the Federal Republic and changed its energy future, albeit not in ways that proponents of nuclear energy imagined in the 1970s and 1980s.