BY JIM GREEN
The largest shipment of high-level nuclear waste between France and Germany — 1300 tonnes of it — was trained and trucked from La Hague in France to Wendland in northern Germany. on November 11-14.
The waste was taken to a "temporary" storage facility near Gorleben, where it will be stored until a final disposal site is found, if ever.
The nuclear waste train generated many protests in France and Germany — including rallies and direct actions — attracting tens of thousands of people in total. On eleven occasions, protesters managed to delay the train despite the deployment of 17,000 police to secure its passage.
Protesters were subjected to police intimidation, violence and repression. Incidents included:
- the prohibition of the right to assemble along the train route, on pain of five years' imprisonment;
- a police vehicle rammed a crowd of people;
- access to an authorised demonstration was blocked;
- more than 260 people (including children) were detained in a temporary prison;
- 13 people were injured in protests at Hitzacker and Harlingen, one of them seriously; and
- a police officer drew his pistol and threatened a tractor driver (farmers and tractors are commonplace at protests against the nuclear shipments) and bystanders.
Anti-nuclear campaigner Jochen Stay (whose analysis of the betrayal of the anti-nuclear movement by the German Greens appeared in GLW #510, September 25) was violently attacked by police on November 14. His head was bashed against a car several times, he was thrown to the ground, stomped on and thrown into a police vehicle. That incident took place after the waste had already reached its destination. Stay has filed charges against the police.
Police engaged in a major campaign of disinformation. Police falsely claimed that protesters had cut a hole in the Elbe River dike at Laase. On November 13, protesters were falsely accused by police of forcing an express passenger train to a dangerous emergency stop along the route of the waste shipment; no such incident took place. Nevertheless, the headline in the local paper screamed, "Atom opponents risk lives".
Protesters object to the nuclear waste shipments because they pose safety and security risks. In 1997, radiation contamination led to a controversy which forced the conservative Christian Democratic government to indefinitely suspend nuclear waste shipments to and from Germany (only for them to be resumed by the Social Democrat-Greens coalition, which won government in 1998 and was re-elected in September).
Another objection is that the waste shipments to Gorleben amount to a temporary pseudo-solution to the problem of radioactive waste management. The shipments also facilitate the operation of polluting nuclear reprocessing plants in France and Britain, and nuclear power reactors in Germany.
From Green Left Weekly, November 27, 2002.
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