Antinuclear

After stopping for 18 hours, including overnight, amid mass demonstrations, the train only covered about 30 kilometres in four hours. Thousands of activists swarmed the tracks along the route near Dannenberg and boasted that the train’s journey had now topped the 92-hour record set during a shipment one year ago.

Police said they detained about 1,300 people, including some who had chained themselves to the railway, requiring tricky and time-consuming operations to free them before the train could slowly rumble on.

Some 150 people were injured in clashes, most of them demonstrators, according to security forces quoted by German news agency DPA.

The waste, produced in German reactors several years ago and then sent to France for reprocessing, began its journey in a yard operated by French nuclear company Areva in Valognes, Normandy on Wednesday.

The protesters argue that the shipment by train of spent fuel rods is hazardous and note that Germany, like the rest of Europe, has no permanent storage site for the waste, which will remain dangerous for thousands of years…….

At the train’s final destination of Dannenberg, the 11 containers of waste are due to be unloaded onto trucks for the final 20-kilometre leg of the journey by road to the Gorleben storage facility on the River Elbe.

Organisers said about 23,000 protesters had gathered in Dannenberg, while police put the number at 8,000. About 20,000 police have been deployed along the train’s German route.

The demonstrators had travelled from across Germany as well as from Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Italy, organisers said.

The train’s disputed load represents “44 times Fukushima”, according to ecology group Greenpeace, which said a single container could unleash “four times the radioactivity released” by the stricken Japanese nuclear reactor.

The bulk of the protests have been peaceful….

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-11-28/thousands-block-nuke-train-in-germany/3698538/?site=sydney