Thousands protest nuclear transport to German storage site

Nov 26, 2011, 13:08 GMT

Berlin - Anti-nuclear waste protests continued in Germany on Saturday, as thousands assembled to meet a train of nuclear waste set to roll into the northern town of Gorleben.

The government has told citizens that the so-called Castor transport, with a cargo of 11 tightly-sealed casks containing the hazardous material, will only be stored on the site temporarily.

But protesters are afraid that the site may become permanent.

'We are speaking out against Castor transports to Gorleben and voicing a strong no to long-term storage in Gorleben,' protest leader Kerstin Rudeck told German radio station Deutschlandfunk.

There is also concern that the facility, a hollowed salt mine, might be an inadequate long-term storage solution because salt might erode vessels and occasion ground water contamination.

The storage site's website says that the site 'has served as a temporary storage solution for radioactive substances since 1984, with no measurable effect on the neighbouring area.'

The treatment storage site is located in a sparsely populated area some 2 kilometres south of Gorleben, a village of 642 people in Lower Saxony.

The treatment and storage centre is run by a cooperative of Germany's energy companies consisting of E.ON, RWE and Vattenfall Europe.

Thousands of protesters from around Germany travelled Friday and Saturday to the site.

Local farmers donated food and supplies for a free soup kitchen to feed protesters, who assembled on a field hundreds of metres away from the storage area.

A similar protest in 2010 drew upwards of 50,000 protesters, though Saturday's assembly was expected to attract far smaller numbers.

About 20,000 police officers have been deployed to oversee the train's journey to the controversial storage site.

Throughout the night and into Saturday, police employed water canon and pepper spray to subdue protesters who threw smoke bombs at them and the transport itself. They also removed people splayed across train tracks.

Green Party members meeting in Kiel pledged solidarity with the protests and renewed their calls for a quicker end to nuclear power in Germany.

On Friday, protests clashed with police, at times violently, on the French side of the border.

The shipment is the last in a series of nuclear waste transports to be made from France to Germany. The waste being moved Friday was produced in Germany and treated at a nuclear reprocessing plant in northern France.

Germany decided to phase out nuclear energy by 2022 in the wake of the Japanese nuclear accident in March this year, but has not found a permanent solution to storing its waste.