(452.4476) WISE-Amsterdam - The first Castor shipment of nuclear waste from the reprocessing plant in La Hague, France, to Gorleben's interim storage facility (a permanent one does not exist yet) in April 1995 was met with a series of antinuclear protest actions near Gorleben and in other parts of Germany, necessitating the deployment of thousands of German police to safeguard the shipment (see WISE NC 432.4266). The second Castor shipment (Wednesday, 9 May) once again drew thousands of anti-nuclear activists - and policemen - into the streets before and during the transport.
Tension built up in the week before the 9 May shipment as antinuclear activists staged several mass actions and other protest activities. On Saturday, 5 May, 10,000 people took part in a peaceful demonstration in Dannenberg. After this big demonstration, the police forcibly dispersed smaller mass actions held on the same day. Six persons were injured; a demonstrator apprehended and beaten up by the police fell unconscious.
By the time the transport of nuclear waste was about to commence, the police had already placed 328 persons under "preventive" detention and arrested 164 others on mere suspicion of vandalism. (All of them have now been set free.)
On the eve and in the early hours of 9 May, protesters brought trucks into the area near Gorleben, intending to use these to obstruct the streets through which the Castor would pass, but the police used sledge hammers and steel cutters to destroy the valves of the trucks.
During the day, 3,000 to 5,000 demonstrators massed near Gorleben and attempted to block the Castor shipment. Clashes between demonstrators and the police ensued as the latter resorted to water cannons to disperse the crowd of protesters. As a result of the forcible dispersal, 31 activists had to be brought to the hospital, six of whom had to be confined; 27 policemen were slightly injured. A policeman will now be sued because he theatened an activist with his pistol. A spokesperson of the police described the situation on Wednesday during the five hours needed for the Castor to be transported over 18 km from the train to the storage site as a "war".
After this "war", there was the typical propaganda of right-wing politicians and journalists. The secretary general of the CDU (the biggest German party), Peter Hintze, called the antinuclear actions as "unrestrained violence against property and human beings". The demonstrators were depicted as "savages" who were "unable to eat with knife and fork" by the F.A.Z., a very big conservative newspaper. The minister for internal affairs of Lower Saxony, Glogowski, said that the police had been exposed to "very dangerous situations" caused by "1000 to 1500 ruffians and professional demonstrators from all over the country". When asked if he found it appropriate to beat up citizens, the German minister for internal affairs, Kanther, just dismissed the question as being "provocative". In a letter to the German minister for enviromental and nuclear affairs, Merkel, however, Glogovski admitted that the resistance to the Castor shipments has not diminished, and that Lower Saxony could no longer financially afford further transports. Safeguarding the May 9 shipment had cost about US $37 million. All in all, 19,000 policemen had been deployed to protect the transport (9,000 near Gorleben).
The May protest actions appear to be a clear success for the antinuclear movement. The antinuclear activists were not able to block the May 9 shipment itself, but they may have made future transports financially and politically unfeasible. A total of 420 Castors had originally been planned to be brought to Gorleben. Wolfgang Ehmke, the spokesperson of the local Buergerinitiative believes that the May 9 shipment was the last transport to Gorleben. A Castor from the nuclear power plant Grundremmingen, which had been scheduled to be delivered to Gorleben in the second week of May, went to Sellafield, UK, instead.
Source: Die Tageszeitung (FRG), 9 and 10 May 1996
Contact: Buergerinitiative Luechow-Danneberg, Drawehner Str. 2, 29439 Luechow, Germany
Tel.:+49-5841-4684
Fax: +49-5841-3197
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