[en] Full text: During the seventies a first idea of dry storage of spent fuel in casks arose at the GNB mother company GNS. The well-known CASTOR cask design with ductile cast iron (DCI) as cask body base material was developed for the dual purposes of storage and transport. After only five years of developing and testing, the first storage license was granted for a CASTOR cask at the centralized storage facility Gorleben. Meanwhile CASTOR casks are used at 19 sites on four continents. Spent fuel assemblies of the types PWR, BWR, WWER, RBMK, MTR and THTR as well as vitrified high active waste containers (HAW) are stored in these kinds of casks. Up to now, more than 660 CASTOR casks have been loaded for long-term storage. The two decades of storage have shown that the basic requirements, which are safe confinement, criticality safety, sufficient shielding and appropriate heat transfer have been fulfilled in each case and, of course, the experience of 20 years has resulted in improvements of the CASTOR cask design. Starting in the middle of the nineties, the new GNB cask line CONSTOR was developed with special consideration to an economical and effective way of manufacturing by using conventional mechanical engineering technologies and common materials. The cask concept also fulfills all design criteria for transport and storage given by the IAEA recommendations and national authorities. By the end of 2002 forty CONSTOR casks have been delivered and 30 of them have successfully been loaded and stored. In the past the German disposal concept was mainly related to reprocessing of the spent fuel in France and Britain and further storage of the high active waste (HAW) in the existing central intermediate storage facilities Ahaus and Gorleben. However, in the consensus with the German Government the German utilities declared a change in their spent fuel policy from reprocessing to direct dry storage. In order to minimize the connected number of transports, the erection of decentralized, on-site intermediate dry storage facilities for spent fuel assemblies was agreed. For the intermediate on-site dry storage different storage facility solutions will be realized. In addition to the several kinds of storage facilities with storage halls, which have been applied for 40 years, a number of utilities applied for a so-called 'Interim Storage Facility', this means storage of the casks under mobile shielding covers made of concrete for a maximum of 8 years. According to the fact that all applicants decided to use CASTOR-casks (CASTOR V/19 for PWR or CASTOR V/52 for BWR) the licencing procedures were able and necessary to be standardized. Thus, the scope of expert assessment can be reduced. The standardization of the licensing procedure is based on the standardization of the application documents. The structure of the documents and the documents proving the fulfillment of the licence requirements for the cask are the same for all applicants. With additional documents only the differences between the types of storages will be taken into account. Since the consensus in 2000 three On-site Interim Storage Facilities and three On-site Intermediate Storage Facilities have been licensed. The licences for the other facilities are expected in 2003. In this paper different types of casks are presented connected with different types of storage solutions. Experiences gained by the large number of cask loadings and more than 4000 cask years of storage will be summarized. The presentation of recent and future development shows the optimization potential of the CASTOR and CONSTOR cask families for safe and economical spent fuel management. (author)