The Urenco
company is extremely secretive about the transports. This time
journalists were told by federal police that the train headed for
Duisburg and on to France.
That
would have taken the dangerous cargo through the densely populated Ruhr
and Rhineland areas – if the police information is correct.
Anti-nuclear activists say they can only speculate what’s to be done with the uranium waste in France.
They
expect it will be processed into uranium oxide in the Pierrelatte
nuclear centre to make it easier to store. Construction of an interim
storage for uranium oxide has been approved. Activists say it could be
decades before the waste is returned to Germany.
Very close to
Pierrelatte are four pressurised water reactors at Tricastin, where
uranium was found in ground water last summer.
The train from
Gronau was held up by two hours because a female French activist who
lives in Germany, 27-year-old Cécile Lecomte, had abseiled over the
tracks from a road overpass. She and other climbers have made such a
name for themselves in disrupting nuclear transports that police now
always have climbing specialists along on the trains to take the
protesters down.
In January last year Lecomte held up a train
for nearly seven hours by abseiling over its rote. This most recent
climbing action was her third in one and a half years on this
non-electrified section of railway.
The protest a day after
the Chernobyl anniversary got some public attention from a
demonstration at Münster central station and near the abseiling
overpass.
“The aim is to reveal the secret atomic transports
from the Gronau uranium enrichment plant and to draw people’s attention
to the policy of Urenco,” she writes. (
http://de.indymedia .org/2009/ 04/248604. shtml)
“Urenco
does not inform people about these transports and the dangers connected
with them. On the contrary, people only get to hear about them when
atomic power opponents manage to expose the departure of atomic
transports by days of precise observation. It was first thought [the
most recent] consignment was going to Russia.”
Lecomte writes
that she means her action to be a signal against atomic policy in
general and expansion of the Gronau enrichment plant in particular.
“Radioactivity
knows no borders. What kind of an end to atomic power is it if Gronau
is expanded, thereby supporting the construction of new nuclear plants
- such as the EPR in Flamanville, France – by supplying the product to
power stations all over the globe.
“The waste is carted right
across Europe in secret transports. That is no solution to the nuclear
waste problem. On the contrary, the population is exposed to ever more
dangers, the environment is polluted ever more.
“Atomic installations need to be switched off immediately,” Lecomte writes.
Pictures of the abseiling at
http://www.anti- atom-aktuell. de/fotos/ 2009-04-27_ uranzugstopp- haeger/. More about Lecomte’s climbing protests at
http://www.eichhoer nchen.ouvaton. org/deutsch/ anti-atom/ Luftakrobatik- Atomtransporte. html .
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