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.

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 fuel elements and vitrified waste block containers are in dry casks standing in a hall above ground and cooled by the surrounding air.

The preliminary choice of Gorleben as a site was made in 1977 by the Minister-President of Lower Saxony, Ernst Albrecht of the CDU, based mainly upon political and economic criteria and particularly the proximity of the area at that time to the border with the GDR, and the sparse local populace.

Specific exploratory geological drillings were carried out between 1979 and 1999, and from the early eighties the results showed that the Gorleben salt dome could actually be unsuitable because of its unstable roof rock and contact with the groundwater.

[citation needed] One example of this instability is the "Gorleben Rut", a gully made by melting glacial ice which runs as low as 320 m below the surface directly above the dome.

This means that the roof of the dome, expected to be several hundred metres thick and made of heavy Oligocene clay layers, does not exist in this form at this spot.

[citation needed] According to the German Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) this is the minimum required for any location to be suitable as a final repository, following their definition of a "multi-barrier system".

These clay layers have been destroyed from below by the diapir of the salt dome as it was forced upwards by tectonics, and from above by material being carried away and filled in by Ice Age glaciers.

[citation needed] Another discovery made by the exploratory drilling was that saliferous groundwater moves both from the sides and the top of the salt dome towards the surface, meaning that if it came into contact with highly radioactive material, the result would be a contamination of the biosphere.

[citation needed] If groundwater is in contact with the halite, another factor to be reckoned with is subrosion, i.e. cavities developing due to salt leaching.

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.