Castor BLOCKADE, Germany

"We hope to make the transportation of this highly dangerous waste as expensive as possible so that the government will have to stop" - Activist

Nuclear waste Castor

At 00.30 on Thursday morning (28/3/2001), a CASTOR trainload of nuclear waste finally arrived - over 24 hours late - at the rural German village of Gorleben. Filled with 60 tonnes of deadly waste, the Castor pulled out of Le Hague in France on Monday on its 375 mile journey.

Despite the freezing weather and the massive police operation anti-nuclear protesters across Germany dogged the shipment every inch of the way. People blockaded, occupied, chained and cemented themselves to tracks; some even staged a volleyball tournament. More than 1,400 people have been arrested amid accounts of massive police brutality. So far, most have been released without charge.

On Tuesday morning, the train was forced to change route after a blockade in Goettingen where Greenpeace activists abseiled with chains connected to the track from Seerau bridge and succeeded in hanging in there for six hours. On Tuesday evening, the train got stuck for hours again, this time at Lueneburg - 50km from the destination. Why? Cos a 'cell train' full of people nicked from an earlier 1600-strong blockade got blocked in on the single-track line to Gorleben by other protesters. Nice one!

And for Babylon, it all went downhill from there. Plans to finish the journey went totally pear-shaped as over 15,000 people - including groups such as x-1000, Robin Wood, Greenpeace, a 'black bloc' of Autonomen anarchists and even local farmers - upped the number of 'delaying' actions, to the fury of over 20,000 tooled-up cops. At Sueschendorf, it took police 20 hours to remove five plucky Robin Wood activists who had chained and cemented themselves in between the tracks. Thousands of people had blocked the line along the final miles of the route and could only be moved by police using extreme force.

Although the evil cargo eventually reached its destination, protesters are regarding the massive disruption as a huge success. The police operation was the largest seen in post-war Germany. Around Dannenberg - the railhead for Gorleben - cops attacked and evicted temporary 'camps' set up in fields by protesters, dispersing people over the freezing countryside. Daft restrictions forbidding tents were brought in by the police, which meant everyone had to sleep out in sub-zero temperatures.

Several protesters were badly injured when riot police charged camps at Nahrendorf and Dahlenberg, while others were nicked and then driven miles away and released - a ruse foiled by activists who quickly got together a 'shuttle bus' to get folk back to the barricades!

This was the first CASTOR (meaning 'Cask for Storage and Transport Of Radioactive waste) train to run since 1998, when clashes between protesters and cops saw a suspension of the noxious trade. German nuclear power stations are legally required to deal with their waste, and unless they can safely store this waste they cannot get a license to operate. The waste storage sites at Gorleben and Ahaus are the only approved sites for storing dodgy stuff after reprocessing at Sellafield in the UK or La Hague in France.

So anti-nuclear activists see the storage sites as critical to the functioning of the whole unpleasant set-up, and there's been a long history of makin' trouble to stop the trains.

In March '97, 7,000 people blocked Dannesburg rail terminal - where the containers are transferred to road trucks for the last few miles into the Gorleben site - cutting down railway power cables and setting light to barricades.

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