Nuclear convoy ends troublesome trek in Germany

 
After days of largely peaceful stand-offs between anti-nuclear demonstrators and police, trucks with 11 containers of waste completed the last 20-km leg of the trip from the town of Dannenberg to the storage site in Gorleben.

Police removed the last of some 3,000 protesters trying to block the delivery. Similar convoys have been bringing atomic waste to the site for years but had never been held up for so long.

The final stretch took the slow-moving trucks around an hour, bringing in the containers over a day later than planned.

The demonstrators, who have been joined by lawmakers from the resurgent opposition Green Party, fear the interim depot in an abandoned salt mine could become a permanent dump — which Greenpeace says would be geologically unsafe in the long term.

They have also been incensed by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s decision to extend the lifespan of Germany’s 17 nuclear power plants, despite overwhelming public opposition.

Activists slowed the police, some 17,000 of whom were mobilised to deal with the protest at the weekend, by locking themselves to objects including pipes and a concrete pyramid.