Nuclear waste transport across shonky bridges

Accompanied by rolling and clattering poison barrels and drummers the demo made a lot of noise as it wended through the town. “For most of the people watching it was probably the first they learned about radioactive waste to be rolling through the area in the next few days and to 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-with argument.”

On Tuesday a special 24-axle rail car brought in from neighbouring Austria for the job is 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.

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.

"Our lawyers are looking into the legal possibilities," notes Jan Becker of the "ContrAtom" group. Opponents fear that the transport will run incalculable risks because decrepit bridges in Lindow (Ostprignitz-Ruppin) couldn’t take the weight.

"Some bridge bolts are rotted through, in some places screws are loose," says Bernd Ebeling, a building engineer and spokesman of an anti-nuclear group, who inspected parts of the 200-km run. The railway corporation rejects this as unfounded panic stirring. The route is in order and poses no risks “or the heavy transport wouldn’t have been approved”, says a spokeswoman.

She says because of the enormous weight two bridges near Lindow have been additionally strengthened and the route wouldn’t be checked again after the warnings of the nuclear opponents – “there’s no reason for it”.

Punctually at 11 a.m on Tuesday the train would roll out of the compound in Rheinsberg, the spokeswoman says, and arrive at the Lubmin dump in the late evening.

That schedule is also assumed by the power company Energiewerke Nord GmbH in Lubmin, which since 1995 has been taking apart the first nuclear power station of the former East Germany .

The 70-megawatt 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 disassembly has reached the sensitive zone. Inside the vessel now being transported the uranium fuel rods once unfolded their incredible power. Originally experts wanted to cut up the steel colossus. But that would have taken too long and cost too much.

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”.