11th hour legal moves to try to stop German nuclear transport across shonky bridges

By Diet Simon, drawing on protestor and mainstream sources

Anti-nuclear groups and a private litigant are trying to get an 11th hour court order to stop the railing on Tuesday of 200 tonnes of nuclear waste across shonky bridges in northern Germany.

"Our lawyers are looking at the legal possibilities,“ says Kerstin Rudek, chairperson of one of the groups, the Bürgerinitiative Umweltschutz Lüchow-Dannenberg (BI), which usually fights nuclear dumping at the village of Gorleben. 

The other litigants are the BI gegen Atomanlagen Uelzen, the Anti-Atom-Initiative contrAtom and a resident of Lindow which is situated near a shonky bridge.

The plan is for a special 24-axle rail car to take the 110-tonne, 11-metre-long reactor pressure vessel of a shut-down Soviet-built power station at Rheinsberg, about 75 km north-west of Berlin,  to an interim storage near Greifswald close to the Baltic Coast, 240 kms north of the German capital.  

The court action will probably be directed against the Federal Railway Authority, the Federal Agency for Radiation Protection (BfS) and the interior ministry of the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin.

"We’re also checking whether an injunction can force those responsible to cancel the transport immediately," says Rudek. If others affected, such as the administration of Lindow, backed the action, chances would increase, she says.

"With these obvious safety flaws to stick to the nuclear waste transport is culpable negligence. We demand a competent examination of the entire rail route and the suspension of the transport,“ Rudek stresses.

People living in Lindow itself have also now voiced their doubts about the safety and necessity of the transport. Head of the local administration, Hortig, for example, says he’s “disquieted and worried”.  A Herr Bock, who lives directly by the tracks, has joined the suit.

Last Saturday nuclear opponents discovered massive flaws on a railway bridge in Lindow. Bernd Ebeling of the BI gegen Atomanlagen Uelzen and a structural engineer says: “You don’t need to be a technical expert to discover that here are loose bolts, rusted-through bolts and broken mountings."

German Railways has said the bridge is to be additionally supported on Tuesday to be able to carry this unusual load on a special car.

 "We demand that the responsible institutions and authorities drop the planned transport date and have an independent structural expertise done on the bridge,” says Ebeling.

Jan Becker of contrAtom adds: "Such miserable state of a track still used regularly even by passenger trains makes one suspect even worse about the closed down spur to the power station.” Becker calls for all rails on the route to Greifswald to be thoroughly checked.

Protests are planned for Monday and Tuesday in Rheinsberg and Greifswald as well as along the entire route the waste will run.

Between 50 and more than 100 people demonstrated in Greifswald on Saturday (see links to road map of the area and pix below).

Local opponents say more than 100 people walked in procession through the centre of Greifswald, whose population is roughly 55,000, including about 11,000 students of the traditional University of Greifswald. The dpa news agency reported 50 demonstrators. Police said the demonstration went off quietly.

Speakers at the rally were from Rheinsberg, from the county of Lüchow-Dannenberg, which has probably Germany’s best-known nuclear dump at Gorleben, and from the port city of Rostock. Protest clowns from Rostock added a splash of colour to a grey autumn day.

Accompanied by rolling and clattering poison barrels and drummers the demo made a lot of noise as it wended through the town.  

“Most of the people watching probably found out this way for the first time that radioactive waste is going to be rolling through the area in the next few days and be ‘interim’-stored here forever,” wrote the “Anti Atom Initiative Greifswald“ at http://de.indymedia.org/2007/10/197931.shtml.

Explaining their reasons for attempts to block the consignment, the group says: “As part of the endless shuffling around of nuclear waste it appears tempting to make this extreme northeast of Germany a nuclear dumping ground. 

“In past years there has been relatively little protest here against the expansion of the former Lubmin power station into an interim dump.

“West Pomerania is one of the structurally weakest regions of Germany and the creation of jobs, no matter how few, has up to now always worked as a beat-opponents-to-death argument.”  

For the 200-km rail trip the vessel will be clad in 15 centimetres of steel to stop radiation getting out.  Opponents of the consignment intend to hold a vigil while it is going on in Kemnitz, a village of 1,200 8 km east of Greifswald. 

Protesters, police and media will be watching and guarding the route, among them Dietmar Woidke, the Social Democrat environment minister of the state of Brandenburg, which surrounds Berlin.

Most people living near it are glad to see the pressure vessel, the former heart piece of the reactor, leave their area for an “interim” dump, the Zwischenlager Nord, consisting of eight halls in Lubmin near Greifswald in the neighbouring state of Mecklenburg-West Pomerania – if protestors don’t stop the consignment.  

The 70-megawatt former teaching and experimental reactor by the Stechlin Lake started operating in 1966. It was taken off the grid in 1990 because of serious safety concerns. By 2012 the operating compound is to be taken out of the jurisdiction of nuclear law. 

The environment ministry says 400 million euros are earmarked for the shut-down.  "The high technical and financial outlay that has to be made just for disassembling the relatively small nuclear power station near Rheinsberg again underscores that atomic power is not an energy form pointing to the future,” says Minister Dietmar Woidke.  

The nuclear opponents also criticise that there is no concept for dealing with the dangerous waste. Experts say it will take about 70 years for the radiation of the pressure vessel to recede enough for it to be used again – for whatever.

That is one of the points the environment protesters will be making along the rail route. “We’ll be there,” promises Dirk Seifert of the "Robin Wood" action group. So will the police, whose local spokesperson, Ariane Feierbach, says, “We’re ready”.   

Road map of the area at http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=d&hl=en&geocode=&time=&date=&ttype=&saddr=Rheinsberg&daddr=Lubmin&sll=53.709714,16.611328&sspn=7.886363,20.061035&ie=UTF8&z=8&om=1)

Pictures at  http://de.indymedia.org/2007/10/197968.shtml