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Nuclear waste convoy blocked by activists in Germany
PTI
Last Updated IST

The anti-nuclear demonstrators staged a night-long sit-in at different places on the road, forcing the authorities to abandon their plans to set in motion the trucks yesterday night.
The road is also blocked by a group of Greenpeace activists, who cemented the bottom of a vehicle on the road and chained themselves inside as well.

Eleven special containers carrying 123 tonnes of highly radioactive waste were transferred to the trucks after a train transporting them finally arrived at its destination in Dannenberg yesterday afternoon.

The train began its 1000-km journey on Friday with the German atomic reactor fuel waste from the La Hague nuclear reprocessing plant in northern France and it was interrupted several times by anti-atom demonstrators.

It also had to change its route because of blocked railway lines.

The demonstrators are protesting against the nuclear waste transport because they fear that the underground storage site in Gorleben is not safe.

They are also expressing their outrage over the centre-right government's decision to extend the life span of the country's 17 nuclear reactors on an average by 12 years.
Anti-atom activists, who organised the demonstrations, expressed satisfaction over the outcome of their campaign.

Their main intention was to delay the nuclear waste transport as long as possible and that has been achieved, a spokesman for the organisers said, he said.

Germany's environment minister Norbert Roettgen defended the transport of highly radioactive nuclear waste saying it has no alternative.

Nuclear waste is the result of several years of power generation  by the country's reactors and Germany is committed to take back the wastes of its atomic reactor fuel processed abroad, he said.

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(Published 09 November 2010, 14:39 IST)