Return to Sender

A convoy of around 40 police vehicles escorted the 18 containers worth of nuclear cargo on the 10-kilometer (six-mile) trip to Dresden airport, where it was loaded onto a Russian cargo plane and took off for Russia Monday morning.

"We cannot understand at all why this transport of highly enriched uranium should be carried out by airplane," said Tobias Münchmeyer of Greenpeace Germany. "This is irresponsible because it is much more dangerous than by rail. Without a doubt it will provoke strong protests."

German police provided security for the transport, which did run into a group of 20 to 30 anti-nuclear protesters who blocked the transport with four cars, forcing the convey to stop briefly and take a detour.

German anti-nuclear campaigners have long been protesting against shipping nuclear fuels across Europe and are calling the airlift of the material to Russia irresponsible.

Material for 10 atomic weapons

Some 200 kilograms (441 pounds) of the 300-kilogram shipment is weapons-grade uranium, enough to fuel about 10 nuclear bombs; the rest was enriched to a lower degree. The material is waste from a research reactor that was built by the Soviet Union in the former East Germany. The reactor is currently being dismantled and its spent fuel rods are being reprocessed in Russia.

In spite of the protests, German nuclear authorities gave the green light for the airlift saying the transport in a special Russian cargo plane was safe.

"We received approval for the air transport. The German and international authorities would never have approved the transport if it had not been secure, even in the event of a plane crash," said Udo Herwig, director of the Rossendorf research center where the material was stored.

Officials in the eastern German state of Saxony, where the reactor is located, said it was sending the material to Russia because modernizing the plant's safety equipment would prove too costly. The Rossendorf reactor, where other scientific research is still conducted, began operation in 1957 but has been shut down since 1991.

"Countries should keep their nuclear waste"

Münchmeyer, however, said activists generally reject transporting nuclear waste across borders.

"We believe that every country with a nuclear industry should keep the nuclear waste it creates within its own borders," he said. "That is why the German material must remain at the reactor site until a solution to the problem of final storage in Germany has been found."

The recovery of the uranium is part of a joint Russian-American program in cooperation with the Global Threat Reduction Initiative, a United Nations nuclear watchdog agency.

The program's aim is to find, secure and recover dangerous nuclear materials around the world to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists.

The international Russian Research Reactor Fuel Return Program, which provides for nuclear material dating from the Cold War to be returned to its country of origin, allowed Saxony to send the material to the Podolsk nuclear plant outside Moscow until the end of this year, Saxon officials said.