Berlin - German authorities will today mobilise 15,000 police and border guards to protect a shipment of radioactive waste through northern Germany from demonstrators intent on preventing the transport, Derek Scally reports. More than 10,000 demonstrators rallied in Luneburg on Saturday to protest against the shipment, which was due to leave La Hague in France early this morning.
Police in riot gear have been posted at 100-metre intervals along the route to a nuclear waste dump in Gorleben in Lower Saxony. The shipment, scheduled to arrive there tomorrow, is the first since 1998, when a similar transport was suspended for safety reasons after running battles between police and protesters. The authorities fear that demonstrators will be even more militant this time and cause "damage in the region of millions of marks".
The government agreed recently to phase out its nuclear energy plants over the next 30 years. But this can happen only if German nuclear waste reprocessed in France is brought back and dumped in Gorleben, argues Mr Jurgen Trittin, the environment minister and a member of the Green Party.