UPDATE - Protests slow German nuclear waste train
Date: 28-Mar-01
Country: GERMANY
Author: Folkert Lenz
Carrying slag from a French plant that reprocesses fuel rods from German reactors, the first such shipment since a ban imposed three years ago took one of the biggest peacetime security operations Germany had ever seen to keep the line open.
After a day of cat-and-mouse between demonstrators and the law, including sporadic protests as the train wove a secret route across the heart of Germany, several hundred activists surged through police lines near Lueneburg and blocked the transport some 50 km (30 miles) short of its destination.
Police had some 20,000 officers on hand along the route to try and prevent the battles that marred previous shipments.
It still took them well over an hour to drag the protesters from the tracks - largely without violence - to let the train continue towards the Gorleben nuclear storage facility.
Some activists chanted slogans, others sang folk songs and hymns. About 200 were detained in a special police train.
Others, forced off to the side of the tracks, jeered when the waste eventually rumbled past them at walking pace. One man leapt from a low bridge onto one of the white, armoured waste casks, known as Castors, forcing it briefly to a stop again.
Others earlier used inflatable power boats to dodge police.
The cargo was due at Dannenberg late in the evening, from where the six wagon-sized Castor containers were to be unloaded and moved 25 km (16 miles) by road to Gorleben on Wednesday.
Under pressure from France to ease a backlog of German waste at its La Hague reprocessing plant near Cherbourg, Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder lifted the transport ban imposed on safety grounds in 1998. About two cargoes a year are now planned.
CALLS FOR CALM
Environment Minister Juergen Trittin, one of Schroeder's ecologist Greens coalition allies and himself once a protester at Gorleben, called for calm. He sees the waste shipments as an integral part of deal he struck with the electricity industry last year to phase out Germany's 19 reactors by about 2025.
But protesters say they want not so much to block the waste altogether - it has to go somewhere - but to make handling it so expensive that the industry shuts down its reactors now.
"We want to make these transports so expensive that they are neither economically feasible nor politically justifiable," said pensioner Helmut Piethers, huddling by a campfire near Gorleben.
While younger "eco-warriors" are in the vanguard of taking on police, Piethers was not atypical among the angry thousands gathered around Gorleben, on the western bank of the river Elbe.
Organisers expect 10,000 people to block the trucks on Wednesday. Last time, police used water cannon to force the road open.
Germany sends spent fuel rods to France where most of the uranium is recovered. The small amount of waste is heated into a form of glass which is then sealed in metal canisters.
Each Castor - the name is short for Casks for Storage and Transport of Radioactive Material - holds 28 canisters and weighs over 100 tonnes. The canisters will be kept in warehouses at Gorleben pending a decision in several years time on their final disposal. One possibility is burial in a nearby salt mine.
