Protesters obstructed a train carrying 12 containers of highly toxic nuclear waste north of the German city of Stuttgart on Sunday as the material was being moved from France to a dump at a heavily guarded saltmine in the north of Germany, DPA reported. In a scene repeated from eight previous waste shipments through Germany in the past decade, protesters bent on sabotage played a cat-and-mouse game with thousands of German police officers assigned to guard the tracks. Police said the train was brought to standstill at Bietigheim- Bissingen around dusk as protesters blocked the tracks. The train had departed Saturday from a railyard near a radioactive waste processing plant at La Hague, western France. In Lower Saxony state, where the waste was to be offloaded onto trucks and moved to the saltmine, 10,000 police were on duty for the event. On Saturday, police counted 3,100 protesters at a rally near the dump at Gorleben, south of Hamburg. Last week, overhead wiring on two railway tracks west of Berlin was wrecked, apparently by anti-nuclear militants. The containers, full of hot waste put into glass pellets at La Hague, will join 56 other containers that have been brought for storage to Gorleben - officially a temporary, not permanent, storage site.
