A train carrying nuclear waste on the trip from from La Hague to Gorleben
The officers closed roads for miles around Dannenberg and ripped down protest banners. They detained 780 protesters briefly and arrested 45 others. "They didn't allow us even a small, low-profile demonstration," complained Sven Teske of the environmental group Greenpeace. "It was a democracy-free zone."
Antinuclear demonstrators are hardly new to Germany. In fact, this is the second such stop-the-transport protest this year. But since Sept. 11 the demonstrators have a new argument: that the spent nuclear waste, moving slowly by truck or rail, provides an easy target for terrorists.
The German convoy reached the nuclear storage facility at Gorleben last week after a 1,400-km journey mostly by rail from La Hague in northern France, where German nuclear waste had been sent for reprocessing. The train carried six 100-ton, cast-iron casks designed to transport nuclear material safely. Each cask contained 28 canisters of nuclear waste at temperatures of around 400°C. They will remain in an interim storage facility for between 20 and 30 years, so that the waste can cool down to a more manageable 200°C, when it can be permanently stored in a mine shaft.
Paradoxically, the German antinuclear Green Party helped make the shipment happen. In June the federal government (the Greens are part of the coalition) and the nuclear power industry signed a groundbreaking agreement to phase out atomic energy in Germany completely. Under the deal, each of the country's 19 nuclear power stations will shut down after 32 years of service, an average of 12 years from now. As part of the agreement, the government agreed to take back nuclear waste that had been shipped to France in the '70s and '80s for reprocessing into storable materials.
There are roughly 170 more casks to be returned to Germany for storage. The agreement also provides for reprocessing to end in 2005. Between now and then, officials say, another 500 casks will be sent for reprocessing either to France or to Britain's Sellafield nuclear facility. "However hard it may be," said German Environment Minister Jürgen Trittin, a prominent member of the Green Party, "we have to deal with the waste that Germany's nuclear-energy policy produced."
The protesters hope to disrupt these future shipments, by blockading roads, sabotaging rails or making the whole process so costly that the government calls them off. During a protest in March, when 10,000 demonstrators turned out, the government spent $22.5 million to provide police protection for the train.
Now protesters are playing the terrorism card. "Nuclear transport is always dangerous, but in this situation it shouldn't be done," said Greenpeace's Teske. "The casks wouldn't survive a plane crash." That case was boosted at a special session on nuclear terrorism held by the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna this month. There experts warned that the threat of sabotage on spent-fuel nuclear transport was being underestimated.
"If terrorists were willing to kill thousands of innocent people in suicidal attacks against buildings symbolizing America's economic and military power . . . they would have little trouble acquiring antitank weapons that could blow up the heavy canisters in which radioactive spent fuel from nuclear reactors is transported through populated areas," wrote George Bunn and Fritz Steinhausler at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation in the October issue of Arms Control Today. "Despite the danger, no multilateral treaty requires that nuclear material and facilities be protected from such attacks."
Jürgen Sattari, spokesman for a Bremen-based environmental group called Robin Wood, said the November protesters had a simpler idea in mind: an earlier phase-out of nuclear power in Germany. "Our goal is to stop the use of atomic energy," he said, "and the transport of waste is one possibility to show the politicians that this is not the right energy."