Thousands demonstrated in France today for a change in the country's energy policy to eliminate nuclear power and end nuclear waste reprocessing.
In Toulouse, about 10,000 people turned out for a parade, according to organisers from the "Sortir de Nucleaire" group.
Demonstrators came from the Mid-Pyrenees region, Correze and Bearn to the city's Place du Capitole for the protest, which broke up peacefully at about 6 p.m. (5 p.m. Irish time).
The parade also included numerous ecological groups such as Friends of the Earth and the Greens, as well as political organisations like the LCR or anarchist federation and the CNT (National Confederation of Workers) union.
The protestors' anti-nuclear banners called for an end to nuclear power - "it's expensive, it kills and it pollutes" - and, in some cases, the state apparatus that supports it - "it's the nuclear state we need to atomise".
In Lyon, Ms Dominique Voynet, secretary general of the French Greens environmentalist party and a former environment minister, stressed it was both "possible and necessary" to stop nuclear recycling in France.
At Colmar in the east of the country, some 2,000 demonstrated against the 20-year-old nuclear power station at Fessenheim.
One banner read: "20 years of radioactive waste and risk of accidents is quite enough."
Demonstrators from Switzerland and Germany joined the protest against the power station situated in a border area close to both of those countries.
Some 8,000 demonstrators rallied in the western city of Nantes under the motto: "Let's quit the nuclear age."
Members of the environmentalist organisation Greenpeace, the French Greens and the local Breton independence movement UDB took part in the demonstration.
Yesterday, France deployed air-defence systems around a nuclear installation, indicating its readiness to shoot down hijacked passenger aircraft such as the ones used in the September 11th attacks in the United States.
Radar from a ground-to-air missile battery were installed near the La Hague nuclear waste reprocessing plant in Normandy in order to "enhance air surveillance at low altitude", a defence ministry spokesman said.
AFP