Anti-nuclear activists to cripple railway

Tens of thousands of demonstrators from all over Germany are again expected in the forest and farmland area to which tens of thousands of police are sent to ensure the consignment reaches a prefabricated hall outside the village.

The protesters are resigned to the fact that the consignments, which happen about every two years, ultimately always reach the destination, but they delay them as best they can to draw attention to the lack of a permanent repository for nuclear waste anywhere in the world.

Each transport costs about 50 million euros of taxpayers’ money to police. Opinion polls consistently find about two out of three Germans opposed to nuclear energy, produced by 17 power stations in the country.

This year the protesters intend to hit the last leg of the railway track from the town of Lüneburg (53° 15' 0" North, 10° 24' 0" East) to Dannenberg (53° 6' 0" North, 11° 6' 0" East).

They plan to remove the crushed stone ballast from the trackbed on which the sleepers are laid, to make the track impassable for the very heavy waste train.

A call is travelling through the anti-nuclear movement to take part in what in German is being called “schottern”, a new verb creation from “Schotter”, the German noun for the railbed rocks.

Videos showing how it’s meant to happen are circulating on the Internet and getting thousands of hits. See two typical ones at  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pq_NQGuzW4 and  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3ReyyTHKGs.

The ballast is packed between, below, and around the sleepers to facilitate drainage of water, to distribute the load from the sleepers and to keep down vegetation that might interfere with the track structure. This also serves to hold the track in place as the trains roll by.

The local state attorney’s office has started almost 500 investigations into supporters of the "Castor schottern" campaign.

“Lay your ear on the rails of history,” says an activist site, “history is going to be made in the Wendland (the name of the area) in November 2010. This time we’ll stop the CASTOR and put the power question out there!”

The authorities have closed down one protester Internet site in southern Germany, the posting says.

Chief prosecutor Roland Kazimierski is quoted as saying the investigations are also meant as a “deterrent”.

Various groups have stated that “schottern” does not rate as a criminal offence but is a legitimate means of political altercation.

They point out that police and judiciary have tried for years to criminalise legitimate resistance.

“If elections, demonstrations, requests and begging change nothing, people have to make the changes themselves. Then abandoning nuclear power is literally a hands-on task.”

Some more relevant sites:

 http://www.castor-schottern.org/videos

 http://kanalb.org/topic.php?play_id=2158&modul=Clip&clipId=289

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3fIzguCDjs

 http://www.greenpeace-jugend.de/node/2688

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gmffWu8XL2E

 https://www.x-tausendmalquer.de/index.php?id=36#c143

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5oB6NO5hHt4

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnoTcBCNGDE

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzz1HTlbiSc

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vbxk3qwUsk

 http://wendland-net.de/index.php/artikel/20101010/bi-ratschlag-10243

 http://www.cinerebelde.org/prozessauftakt-castorgleisblockade-p-100.html

 http://www.youtube.com/user/BiLuechowDannenberg#p/u/1/bcpWJwTA5tg

 http://atomkraftwegbassen.blogsport.de/videos/

 http://castorstop.blogsport.de/2010/09/28/mobi-jingle-online/

 http://www.graswurzel.tv/v125.html

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1NSD-RpD3c

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DgeZd4hM_tI

 http://nix-da.6x.to/

 http://nix-da.6x.to/

 http://www.castor-schottern.org/

 http://www.facebook.com/pages/Castor-Schottern/157481940931227

 http://twitter.com/castorschottern

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3ReyyTHKGs

 http://streetart137.blogsport.de/

 http://hartbackbord.tk/

 http://www.constitution.org/jjr/socon.htm