German nuclear waste reaches its destination

Nov 13, 2006, 8:12 GMT

Gorleben, Germany - Hundreds of protestors whistled and booed as container trucks hauling spent nuclear fuel left a train station and reached their final destination in northern Germany Monday morning.

   Demonstrators stopped the train carrying 12 containers several times during its 44-hour run from a processing factory in France to the German town of Dannenberg.

The containers of reprocessed nuclear waste were offloaded and trucked 20 kilometres to Germany's main storage facility for waste in the small town of Gorleben. Police monitored the convoy by helicopters.

   Several hundred demonstrators staged a brief sit-in to block the road between Dannenberg and Gorleben and placed concrete blocks on the road to slow the convoy. Police moved them out of the way and secured the road.

Nine preceding waste-transport operations were also opposed by protesters in what has become a ritual in Germany.

Two years ago a man was killed in France when he lay on the track and the Dannenberg-bound nuclear train was unable to stop in time.

The spent fuel, from German nuclear power stations, has been stabilized in pellets of glass and packed inside a type of storage container known as a 'castor.' The warehouse at Gorleben already contains 68 castors of the high-grade radioactive waste.

   The waste will remain radioactive for thousands of years.

Germany is considering whether to sink them down an old salt mine nearby or to build a long-term waste dump somewhere else.