German police escort nuclear waste shipment
Date: 10-May-01
Country: GERMANY
Police said there were only about 20 anti-nuclear activists protesting against the train, which carried 246 spent fuel rods from a Soviet-era power plant in Rheinsberg, 80 km (50 miles) north of Berlin.
The demonstrators were outnumbered by a force of 6,500 police officers. The train, on its way to a temporary storage facility in northern Germany, started its journey shortly after 0300 GMT.
Thousands of demonstrators protested in March when Germany took back the first cargo of reprocessed waste from France since the German government banned the shipments in 1998 over concerns about radioactive leaks.
In April a small group of German environmental activists chained themselves to rail tracks for several hours hoping to stop wagons they said were due to carry a shipment of nuclear waste.