Nuclear Waste Arrives

Hundreds of protestors whistled and booed as container trucks hauling spent nuclear fuel and stopped the train carrying 12 containers several times during its 44-hour run from a processing factory in France to the German town of Dannenberg.

The containers of reprocessed nuclear waste were offloaded and trucked 20 kilometers (12.43 miles) to Germany's main storage facility for waste in the small town of Gorleben. Police monitored the convoy by helicopters.

Annual protest blocks rail

Hundreds of anti-nuclear activists tried to prevent the waste reaching the dump on the final leg of its journey.

Dozens of protesters chained themselves to concrete blocks Sunday evening on a road leading to Gorleben, while 400 activists staged a sit-in across a road in a bid to prevent the trucks leaving the town of Dannenberg.

Protesters from Greenpeace climbed on trees and hung banners from the branches, but hundreds of police moved the demonstrators out of the way.

Nine previous waste-transport operations were also opposed by protesters in what has become a ritual in Germany.

The anti-nuclear group "X-tausendmal quer" claimed its members had caused the disruption.

The train was temporarily stopped after activists from the environmental organization Robin Wood chained themselves to a rope strung between trees either side of the track near Dannenberg.

A total of 16,000 police were mobilized to protect the train as it edged through Germany after leaving the reprocessing plant at La Hague in northwest France on Friday.

Up to 6,000 environmentalist militants, according to figures supplied by protest groups, demonstrated in Gorleben at the weekend, calling for this type of transport to be abolished and for the storage centre to be shut.

Police said the protests were peaceful in contrast with similar transports in previous years.

Protests have toned down

The nuclear transports have traditionally been a focus of protests, although they have been less chaotic in recent years than at their peak in the 1990s.

A 22-year-old Frenchman was killed in 2004 when he was run over by a train in the French city of Nancy as he demonstrated against a shipment.

This is the 10th transport of the nuclear waste which is produced by German power plants but sent to France because Germany has no re-processing facilities.

Germany is contractually obliged to take the waste back, but activists argue that Gorleben, which was selected in 1977 as a temporary storage site, is unsafe.

Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said on Sunday that other locations for storing nuclear waste should be considered.

"The people in this region are protesting, because they have the feeling that the Gorleben dump has been pre-determined," Gabriel said.

The transports are scheduled to continue until 2010.

Radioactive waste still contentious issue

The spent fuel, from German nuclear power stations, has been stabilized in pellets of glass and packed inside a type of storage container known as a 'castor.' The warehouse at Gorleben already contains 68 castors of the high-grade radioactive waste.

The waste will remain radioactive for thousands of years.

Germany is considering whether to sink them down an old salt mine nearby or to build a long-term waste dump somewhere else.