Protests halt German atom waste train

["Sandy Perle" <sandyfl@EARTHLINK.NET>]

Protests halt German atom waste train



LUENEBURG, Germany, March 27 (Reuters) - Hundreds of German 

environmental activists brought a heavily guarded train carrying 

nuclear waste to a halt on Tuesday by rushing massed ranks of riot 

police and sitting on the tracks close to its destination. 



The train carrying slag from a French plant that reprocesses fuel 

rods from German reactors had covered the 1,500 km (950 miles) from 

La Hague in Normandy to Lueneburg, south of Hamburg, without incident 

- -- although it took one of the biggest peacetime security operations 

Germany had ever seen to keep the line open. 



Some 200 mostly young protesters broke through riot police lines in 

late afternoon and began a sit-in at Lueneburg, 50 km (30 miles) 

short of the station where the waste was to be unloaded and moved by 

road to the Gorleben dump on Wednesday. 



Police have some 20,000 officers on hand to try to prevent the 

running battles that marred previous shipments before they were 

banned three years ago. They dragged most of the protesters bodily 

from the tracks but there was little violence. 



The train was due to reach Dannenberg later in the evening, from 

where six wagon-sized armoured containers were to move 25 km (16 

miles) to Gorleben on Wednesday. 



Earlier a group of Greenpeace activists in inflatable power boats 

evaded police to protest on a rail bridge they said was too weak. 

Police held dozens of protesters at other sit-ins. 



Demonstrators and police engaged in games of cat-and-mouse as the 

train wove a secret route across the heart of Germany. It had crossed 

the French border, 500 km (300 miles) from Gorleben, under cover of 

darkness just before midnight on Monday. 



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 untypical of the angry thousands gathered around 

Gorleben on the sparsely peopled western bank of the river Elbe, 

which once formed the border with East Germany. 



Organisers expect 10,000 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 superheated into a form of 

glass which is then sealed in metal canisters. 



Each of the train's six wagon-sized white armoured containers called 

Castors -- the name is short for Casks for Storage and Transport of 

Radioactive Material -- holds 28 such canisters and weighs over 100 

tonnes. 



The radioactive 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. 



- ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sandy Perle                                     Tel:(714) 545-0100 / (800) 548-5100                                     

Director, Technical                             Extension 2306                                  

ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Service         Fax:(714) 668-3149                                          

ICN Pharmaceuticals, Inc.                       E-Mail: sandyfl@earthlink.net                                                      

ICN Plaza, 3300 Hyland Avenue           E-Mail: sperle@icnpharm.com                       

Costa Mesa, CA 92626



Personal Website: http://sandyfl.nukeworker.net

ICN Worldwide Dosimetry Website: http://www.dosimetry.com



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