Ahaus and Gorleben: too much to fight?

Activists’ first aid helpers reported 85 protesters injured, some with broken bones, by police actions in the previous Gorleben transport last November. ( http://de.indymedia.org//2003/11/66061.shtml)

As it is often the same protesters in action at various locations, such a concentration of nuclear tourism may just be too much for activists to handle. Is that perhaps intentional?

The Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS) in Salzgitter (“BfS works for the safety and protection of man and the environment against damages due to ionising and non-ionising radiation,” it boasts at its website) says it’s found the Gorleben hall where waste is stored able to withstand an airliner crashing into it.

The BfS says a review of the Gorleben licence had included the effects of an aimed crash of a large passenger plane on to the storage hall. The agency does not say how that test was carried out.

The agency says 36 more containers with highly radioactive waste left over from reprocessing in La Hague, France, spent fuel rods from German power stations can be put in the hall without fear of amounts of radioactive materials that could harm life or health being released in case of such a crash.

It was still being examined, BfS said, whether any more than the 36 could be safely stored in the hall, with findings expected in mid-year.
The date for the train run would have to be agreed by the transport company, Nuclear Cargo + Service GmbH, a 100% subsidiary of the German Railways, and the governments of the federal states it would traverse.

The BfS media release includes: “Conditions set for the transport permit issued…ensure that the internationally set caps on radioactive contamination on the surface of the transport containers are met. Also, concrete measures were set for prevention of contamination, control of contamination, transport documentation and reporting duties as was the case with earlier … transports in 2003 of the CASTOR HAW 20/28 CG type containers.” (For the scientific gobbledygook on this container type see  http://www.grs.de/module/layout_upload/dosisleistung_021031.pdf, a factory picture is at  http://www.gns-nuklearservice.de/generator.aspx/templateId=renderPage/lang=de/id=7846, a picture of the likely sort of train at  http://bgs.livinglogic.de/xist4c/web/Castor-Zug_id_99_.htm, website of the border police who’ll accompany and guard it in their thousands.)

Meanwhile the Gorleben resistance group Bürgerinitiative Umweltschutz Lüchow Dannenberg ( http://www.bi-luechow-dannenberg.de/) has sharply protested against a demand from the atomic power industry to immediately start using or continue exploring a probing Gorleben salt mine and a former iron ore mine, Schacht Konrad, near Salzgitter, as final nuclear waste repositories.

The demand not only clashes with the consensus between government and industry to get out of nuclear electricity production, says the group, there are nearly 30-year-old solid scientific findings showing the experimental mine in Gorleben to be catastrophically unsafe and needing urgent closure.

The Gorlebeners demand that the federal government at long last turn the moratorium on probe mining into a closure. "It is grotesque and unworthy of democracy to express totally justified doubts about the Gorleben location, simply sit out this knowledge and force more transports into the interim storage with thousands of police, thereby cementing the location as the nuclear lavatory.”

The group recalls that the Gorleben exploration was asserted not under atom, but under mining law, which excluded public participation from the procedure and litigation by associations, local authorities or residents.

The Gorlebeners are also angry about a former BfS manager, Bruno Thomauske, being a particularly vehement protagonist of resuming probes of the Gorleben salt mine. Until last year Thomauske headed the disposal security section of the BfS before becoming the highly-paid CEO of Vattenfall, a leading European nuclear power and heat utility. Thomauske had also forced BfS licensing procedures for new interim storages. "All permits should therefore be revoked because of this obvious clash of interests,” says the Gorleben group.

They also dismiss as “brazen deception” Thomauske’s financial argumentation for quickly making Gorleben and Schacht Konrad operational. The Gorlebeners say the 1.3 billion euros squandered on Gorleben and the 800 million on Schacht Konrad hadn’t been paid by the atomic power producers, but by electricity consumers through surcharges on their bills.

"For the atomic power corporations the unsolved disposal of their radiating leftovers has always been a vast horn of plenty,” recalls a Gorleben spokesman. Just until the end of 2002 tax-free reserves of 35 billion euros had accumulated for nuclear waste disposal.

The group appeals to the federal government to put a stop to this at last, to reduce the volume of waste by immediately shutting down all nuclear installations and by making the industry that produces the waste pay for new disposal location studies with public involvement.

Meanwhile the main German news agency, dpa, which is used by practically every medium outlet in the country and by many abroad in English, Spanish and Arabic, has given a crass example of how poorly the mainstream media understand the issues and how sloppily they report them. ( http://www.freenet.de/freenet/politik_kontrovers/aktuell/artikel/index.html?id=cff5ea86b2f810f98b79cc05728f0d94&frn034id=cff5ea86b2f810f98b79cc05728f0d94&sf_forum_title=Atomkraft%20-%20ja%20bitte?&sf_forum_date=29.04.2004&sf_feed=dpa)

A dpa report from Paris on 29 April 2004 about the future of the nuclear industry contained this sentence: “Deutschland lagert den Atommüll in einem «Zwischenlager» in den Salzstöcken von Gorleben ein.” “Germany stores its nuclear waste in Gorleben salt deposits” – see above. Give dpa a piece of your mind at  http://www.dpa.de/de/produkte/wort/basisdienst.html.



In the other currently most visible disposal dispute, transport to Ahaus, the Saxony government in Dresden has made an offer that no-one seems to be taking seriously.

Dresden says it intends to halve to nine from the original 18 the number of truck trips to Ahaus with waste from the Rossendorf experimental reactor inherited from communist East Germany.

The state government is trying to organise the necessary equipment, said a spokesman. It had previously argued that there was only one of the special shock absorbers needed in Germany and that at 90,000 euros each it was too expensive to have more made.

Now, miraculously, a second unit appears to have been located somewhere in Europe (no one’s said where) and the government says there’s a chance to borrow it.

North-Rhine Westphalia and other states the trucks will cross had pressed for fewer trips for financial and safety reasons. They’re suggesting three runs with six Castors each. Saxony has rejected demands by the other states to rail the waste, arguing that there’s no rail siding to the decommissioned plant.

Dresden has also offered to have only its own police accompany the transports, while the other states should secure the routes. The Saxon interior minister said he assumed this would significantly cut the costs of the states through which the trucks would run.

Not to be taken seriously, responded the NRW government in Düsseldorf, it didn’t solve any of the problems. Travelling with the trucks involves only about 10 percent of the police input, the NRW interior minister said, and Saxony had a totally skewed perception of what Castor transports involved. Moreover, the suggestion changed nothing in police deployment in Ahaus, where the biggest protest was to be expected.

The Saxon section of the police trade union also rejected the idea. Riot police would be totally overstretched by such an assignment, it said. Police were in any case already working beyond capacity. The government spokesman dismissed this as too hasty and added that nothing was known yet about the number of police needed.

The union’s position was shared by an opposition Social Democrat in the regional parliament, Peter Adler, who dismissed Dresden’s proposals as unrealistic. Complete accompaniment of the truck runs was beyond police possibilities, he said.

Police guards from the source state for an entire nuclear waste transport would be a first in Germany. Usually each state pays for police activity in its area.

NRW’s environment minister, Bärbel Höhn, of The Greens, has put a price tag of 50 million euros for the police assignment just in her state, which accounts for only 200 of the more than 600 kilometres of the entire Dresden-Rossendorf – Ahaus run.

NRW is trying to stop the trucking with legal action in an administrative court responsible for the area where the BfS licensing authority is located. It has said it will take the litigation to the highest level if necessary.

Eighteen truck trips of nuclear waste were an intolerable strain, Höhn said, which would considerably disrupt road traffic and public life. She called it an intolerable burden on the population and accused Saxony of trying to save at the expense of others.

She demands that Saxony build its own storage facility and keep the 951 spent fuel rods there. However, the national disposal concept so far provides for waste from old experimental reactors to be centrally stored in Ahaus.

Höhn wants the charges regime in NRW changed. She said her Düsseldorf-based government is looking into the possibility of billing other states for the costs of police deployments to accompany and guard nuclear waste transports. By having to share that way, she said, states like Saxony would be forced in their handling of nuclear waste to choose the lowest-cost option.

Saxony had put the pure transport cost at 1.4 million euros when 18 runs were still under consideration. But the state claims that it has to carry on its own a special burden of 353 million euros for dismantling the 1957 Soviet-made Rossendorf reactor switched off in 1991, whereas the federal government covered up to 90% of such costs at other locations.

Resistance to trucking has also been voiced by an opposition state MP in neighbouring Thuringia, Social Democrat Christine Klaus, Member for Jena, who expressed the fear that people of the town might soon find themselves "sitting in the front row of the Castor Festival".

Klaus says the route will be on the A 4 autobahn through Thuringia, directly past Jena. She referred to dangers posed by many building sites on that stretch of motorway.

"The convoys accompanied by police and protesters will block the autobahn for weeks," the Social Democrat parliamentary group’s environmental expert told a local newspaper. If they were going to roll at all, she said, the Castors should be bundled and railed. But the best option was to leave the waste in Saxony until a final repository was found somewhere.

Klaus has tabled a parliamentary question to the conservative state government’s interior minister, Andreas Trautvetter, how he sees the matter and how much the state is likely to have to pay up for policing.

A government spokesman said they’d wait for the outcome of the NRW/Saxony legal action for now and in any event there was also another possible route via Dresden-Magdeburg-Hanover. He said the Thuringian interior minister had also pressed for fewer transports when representatives of the states to be traversed met recently.

The Saxon Castors are not as large as the better-known ones for spent power station fuel rods. Whereas the last transport to Ahaus six years ago comprised ten tonnes of waste, each of the Rossendorf Castors will contain only 6.3 kilograms – roughly the comparison between a suitcase and a matchbox.

But that’s hardly likely to make Castor opponents content to hold up placards at roadsides. For the last Ahaus shipment 16,000 police were deployed. Security experts in NRW have told the conservative daily newspaper DIE WELT that they expect much less mobilisation by activists than the NRW government is predicting.

The Saxon interior minister, Steffen Flath, said in a radio interview large demonstrations might be expected for the first transports, but not for all 18 – the figure still current as he spoke. He might just be wrong about that…..

Insiders expect the trucks to start running at the end of June or early July.

Other nuclear news:

· China has said it has broken off talks with the German government over purchasing a Siemens-owned uranium processing plant at Hanau that was never licensed to start up. A spokesman in Beijing said Prime Minister Wen Jiabao would not be raising the matter when he visits Germany next week. Greens in the Berlin government with Social Democrats said the issue threatened to break the coalition apart, but it was now safe.

· Forty multinational artists, activists and idealists have started a month-long Tour de France for abandoning nuclear energy, taking them to nuclear installations. The French 'Sortir du Nucleaire' group are the organisers. 'ADER', a Swiss collective, are contributing a truck with an exhibition on alternative energies. The Dutch 'Rampenplan' are running a mobile organic kitchen and 'Theaterstraat', also from Holland, have a stage truck and a coach with IndyMedia access. 'Brut-de-Beton' will perform their piece "Chernobyl" en route. There are also bands and other street performers. The tour started on April 24 and runs until May 23. Almost daily there will be video clips at  http://tour.indymedia.nl.  trojan@nadir.org.