Nuclear waste train enters Germany
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Train loaded with nuclear waste crosses border into Germany
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DANNENBERG, Germany (AP) -- A trainload of radioactive waste rolled into a northern German rail terminal Tuesday on its way to a nuclear waste storage site after police pulled 150 protesters from the tracks.
The 650 meter (2,100 foot)-long train, carrying 12 containers of reprocessed waste, reached the fortified terminal at Dannenberg at about 3:30 p.m., some five hours behind schedule.
The train left a reprocessing plant at La Hague, northwestern France, on Sunday, bound for a dump at Gorleben in northern Germany that is the traditional focus of the country's well-organized, militant anti-nuclear lobby.
Slowed in Germany and France on Monday by activists who chained themselves to the rails, the train was halted for 1 1/2 hours on the final stretch of its journey as police cleared some 150 protesters who blocked the line at Rohstorf, southeast of Hamburg.
Protests complained of heavy-handed police tactics, saying that one activist suffered a broken leg and that others suffered facial injuries.
Just outside Dannenberg, riot police, including officers on horseback, formed a cordon that prevented some 200 protesters from reaching the track as the train approached, escorted by three police helicopters.
The mostly youthful demonstrators jeered as the wagons rolled slowly by. Police said some of their officers were bombarded with bottles and fruit.
Overnight, the train was forced to stop for about two hours in southwestern Germany by two demonstrators who chained themselves to a pipe under the tracks -- a favored tactic of activists which forces police to call in engineers and heavy equipment to cut them free.
In Dannenberg, experts were to check the containers for leaks before cranes swing them onto trucks for the last few kilometers (miles) to the dump.
Previous shipments have regularly led to clashes between thousands of demonstrators and police. But this week's delivery, the first since November 2002 and the seventh in all, has drawn far fewer opponents.
The demonstrations have faded somewhat since the German government announced plans to phase out nuclear power and restart the search for a permanent storage site for the radioactive waste.
Agreed in 2001 after hard bargaining with the power industry, the phase-out is to begin Friday, when a 32-year-old plant near Hamburg will be switched off.
Activists complain that the timetable is too slow and residents of the sparsely populated area around Gorleben are fearful that what is currently a temporary dump will eventually become permanent. Environmentalists say the highly radioactive waste could contaminate groundwater.
The waste is currently stored in a warehouse near a disused salt mine that an earlier government decided was suitable as a permanent underground storage site.
The last of Germany's 19 nuclear plants is expected to close in about two decades.
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