More Castors rolling soon, this time to Ahaus

The Citizens Initiative Kein Atommüll in Ahaus (No Nuclear Waste in Ahaus) says in a media release their future ?looks a lot worse than expected? after what they were told on a visit to the Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Protection and Reactor Safety in Berlin on 20 November.

The release, published in German at  http://de.indymedia.org/2003/12/68996.shtml on the de.indymedia.org at the de.indymedia.org site reports on an ?informative meeting? at the ministry with a Herr Reinhard Kaiser. The 25 participants from Ahaus in the c. two-hour meeting were from the Citizens Initiative ( http://www.bi-ahaus.de/) and an Independent Voters Group (Unabhängige Wählergruppe, UWG,  http://www.uwg-ahaus.de/).

The activists? release says long preparation went into the trip and they submitted all their questions in writing three weeks in advance.

The Ahauseners say Kaiser informed them that 18 Castor MTR-2 caskets are standing ready for transport to Ahaus at a technical research centre near Dresden. The waste in them is described as ?heat-developing radioactive waste?.

The research centre is at Rossendorf ( http://www.fz-rossendorf.de/) about 10 kilometres northeast of Dresden (population 480,000), Germany?s 15th largest city. The ?interim storage? facility for nuclear waste at Ahaus (pop. 40,000) lies about 55 kilometres northwest of Münster (pop. 268,000), 10 kms from the Dutch border and 25 kms from Enschede (pop. 150,000), the Netherlands? ninth largest city.

The Rossendorf reactor was started in 1957 by the then communist government of East Germany, with no concept on what to do with its waste. In 1993 the Saxony state government had to close it down because under federal German law it could no longer be licensed. All the approximately 1,000 highly radioactive fuel rods used in 34 years of operation are still stored in Rossendorf.

?Although there is not yet any storage permit for the fuel element interim storage (BZA, Brennelement-Zwischenlager Ahaus GmbH,  http://www.eco-select.de/firm/3396.htm) nor for transporting the CASTOR MTR-2, Herr Kaiser expects the necessary change permit for the BZA, respectively the necessary permits, in the first half of 2004,? says the citizens group release.

?Without any storage permit Rossendorf has already rented standing space in the BZA hoping for ultimate legalisation. This is the same procedure as practised by the operators of the [high flow] FRMII research reactor in Garching [near Munich].?

The statement charges that the reactor safety ministry ?supports this way of working and has now decided that waste from all research reactors will be interim-stored in Ahaus.?

?This is although the nuclear waste from the FRM II is highly enriched uranium, usable for weapons and hence much more dangerous. This waste would turn the Ahaus storage into a ?military high security sector?,? the release says.

The anti-nuclear group also quotes the ministry official telling them that the French reprocessing plant in La Hague, which recycles German waste, will package it highly compressed from 2005.

?Probably from 2008 the waste from German nuclear power stations will be packaged there and brought to Ahaus. This process is to be completed by 2018. The containers, respectively the types of packaging and the composition of the waste, depend on the applicant and have no influence on the licensing of the return transports by the ministry.?

After that, says the group?s release, the waste is to stay until 2013 in the Ahaus BZA. The operating licence for the BZA would end by 2036 at the latest.

?In the view of the Citizens Initiative the planned transportation of the 18 CASTOR MTR-2 containers from Rossendorf is not necessary. The Castors are currently stored in a newly erected transportation preparation hall that meets the same safety norms as the BZA [Ahaus]. A planned transport right across Germany was already cancelled once in 1999 and has not become any more sensible since then. Should a final repository be identified in the foreseeable future, this might make a return transport across Germany necessary. The approach by the reactor operators in Rossendorf to first rent storage spaces in Ahaus without a relevant storage permit and later to derive from this a legal entitlement to transportation and storage permits might be juridically possible, but in the view of the Citizens Initiative is socially intolerable.?

The group says the planned similar transports from Garching raise considerable additional safety concerns. ?The BZA is a thin-walled storage hall that is in no way suited to holding highly enriched uranium waste.?

The Citizens Initiative regards the subsequent changes of storage permits for the BZA as very worrying and inadmissible in technical safety terms.

?We reject the planned return transports of partially undefined recycling waste from La Hague with partially highly toxic bituminised fluid wastes because of the lacking storage permit and the totally unsuitable storage Hall 1 of the BZA. The return transport to the producers initially planned by the environment minister is no longer part of the socalled ?atomic consensus?.?

Past transports to Ahaus have met with massive nationwide protest. Scores of thousands of police were assigned, costing hundreds of million of marks.

Ahaus and Gorleben protesters have been closely linked because of the similarity of their problems. The Gorlebeners just last month protested against 12 Castors going into a storage hall there to join 44 others. Their first aid teams report that 85 were injured by ?police brutality?.

In August this year the Gorleben citizens? initiative won a court case after five years of litigation that a camp they?d set up for 300 of their protesters for the last transport to Ahaus was legal. Under threats of violence, police had ordered it disbanded two days after it was set up, arguing it was in a no-assembly zone within 1,000 metres from railway tracks. ?Totally absurd, over-the-top police action,? said a Gorleben spokesman, welcoming the judgment against the police. The Münster administrative court based its ruling on that of the German supreme court that authorities had to prove any threatening danger, and that mere suspicion was not enough to ban demonstrations. The Gorlebeners? lawyer saw it as an encouraging judgment for their future activities.
?At last a change from Gorleben,? writes a ?Gunni from Göttingen? in response to the Ahaus group?s indymedia posting. ?About time that there was an Ahaus programme again. I?m gradually getting bored driving to Gorleben every cold, wet November to watch these well-behaved peace primroses sit on rail tracks to be then, equally well-behaved, carried off by cops carted in from all over Germany without there being even a whiff of riot in the air. Dear Wendlanders, what?s up with you? In 1996 and 1997, in those days, one went gladly to Gorleben, where there was then a mood of revolution, a touch of Wackersdorf [then site of a harsh clashes over an atomic power station to be built], militancy in actions and in people?s heads. But since 2001? Wendland has been no more than an exercising terrain for police squads. Boring. Hope for more fun and programme in Ahaus.?

By Diet Simon