French President Nicolas Sarkozy says it would be “craziness” to reduce his country's high reliance on nuclear power. Even as other countries including neighboring Germany are renouncing nuclear energy in the wake of Japan's Fukushima nuclear disaster earlier this year, France has remained a bastion of atomic power. France depends on it for three-quarters of its electricity, more than any other country. Sarkozy, who is expected to seek re-election in April, argued that abandoning nuclear energy would destroy jobs. He spoke Friday as thousands of German police were patrolling a train carrying nuclear waste reprocessed in France on its way to a controversial storage site that protesters say is unsafe. The French train carrying 150 tonnes of reprocessed nuclear waste entered Germany Friday en route to a storage site after a 24-hour stop at the border following clashes between riot police and anti-nuclear activists who tried to block the transport. “The train is crossing the border at this very minute with German police forces on board. Everything has gone well,” a French interior ministry spokesman said by telephone from the area. French officials said on Thursday the temporary halt was meant to help ensure public order on the train's route to the storage site at Gorleben in Germany's Lower Saxony state. The “Sortir du Nucleaire” (Exit from Nuclear) activist group said on its website that French authorities had been forced to wait until Germany authorised the convoy to enter its territory on Friday, as originally planned.
