ALSO OF NOTE IN W. GERMANY

A not altogether happy Klaus Von Dohnanyi has been volunteered by his party to become mayor of Hamburg and assume leadership of the badly split Social Democratic Party (SPD) in that northern port city.

He is regarded as an "integration" figure who can unite the squabbling SPD factions if anyone can. The catch is that maybe nobody can. The last mayor, Hans-Ulrich Klose, resigned because he and the SPD left wing opposed construction of any more nuclear power plants for the city's electricity.

Von Dohnanyi should at least start out with the good will of Hamburg citizens , because of his family's resistance to Hitler in earlier years -- and because his brother is the popular conductor of the Hamburg opera.But Von Dohnanyi will regret leaving his Bonn post as state minister in the foreign ministry.

* Elsewhere in West Germany there is a new glimmer of hope in the attempt to get the nuclear energy program going again after five years of a virtual moratorium on new building.

One of the main legal hurdles has been the requirement that construction and commissioning of facilities require assured disposal or reprocessing of nuclear waste. Now the nuclear fuel reprocessing firm of DWK has announced selection of a site in Hessen for the country's first large reprocessing plant. And officials reporting on technical studies say that the Gorleben salt mines in Lower Saxony have proved suitable for storage of radioact ive wastes.

Further ecological suits may be expected.