DANNENBERG, Germany — Police used batons and dogs to remove anti-nuclear activists from a railroad Tuesday, enabling a much-delayed train carrying 80 tons of radioactive waste to finish its trip across Germany.
Small groups of demonstrators held back by police blew whistles as the train inched into the terminal at Danneberg, where the shipment was to be loaded onto trucks for the final 12 miles to a storage site.
The six large containers were expected to arrive Wednesday at an above-ground warehouse near the village of Gorleben, focus of Germany’s well-organized anti-nuclear lobby.
“These shipments just can’t be done securely,” said Jan-Boris Ingerowski, 21, a law student from Hamburg. “Gorleben is about as safe as a potato shed.”
Similar demonstrations across Germany slowed the train, even though 15,000 security forces were deployed along the route. The 870-mile trip began in La Hague, France, the site of a facility that reprocesses waste from nuclear plants in Germany and elsewhere. The six containers held about 80 tons in all.
The shipments are to end by 2005 under an agreement between the German government and the country’s nuclear plants, which are to shut down within 20 years. The protesters say the shipments aren’t safe and want them halted sooner. They pointed to the Sept. 11 terror attacks in the United States as more evidence of the danger posed by nuclear power and radioactive waste.
Police repeatedly had to remove groups of demonstrators, some of them chained to the tracks, hundreds of others sitting on the rails.
In one stretch, two members of the environmental group Greenpeace climbed trees and unfurled a banner across the tracks denouncing the country’s main power companies.
Near the end of the line police used batons and dogs to clear 200 demonstrators from the tracks, a police spokesman said. Several demonstrators were bitten.
Similar tactics during the last shipment in March delayed the train by almost a day.
The containers are to be transferred from Gorleben to a former salt mine once the mine has been determined suitable for a permanent dump, long a subject of dispute.