Protesters braved freezing cold and falling snow Thursday to interrupt the progress of a train carrying nuclear waste destined for a storage site on the coast of northern Germany. Several hundred had camped out near the site in remote woods east of the town of Lubmin waiting for the train to arrive, hoping they could lie on the tracks and force the train to stop. But police cordons held most of them back, dpa reported. The protests were far less ambitious than the mass sit-ins and civil disobedience in early November against a rail shipment of spent fuel rods to a storage site at Gorleben, south of the city of Hamburg. Two demonstrators from an environmentalist group, Robin Wood, evaded the police cordon and chained themselves to the track near the storage site, forcing a halt as night fell with only a few kilometres left to go. A snowstorm was sweeping across Germany Thursday evening. It was the third forced halt for the train, carrying four containers of spent nuclear fuel originally from German scientific reactors. The consignment left Cadarache in France on Tuesday and proceeded through Germany under tight guard. At previous stops, 25 and then 200 protesters invaded the tracks and were dragged away, one by one, by police. The authorities were estimated to have fielded 10,000 police to thwart the protests. The anti-nuclear movement argues that nuclear power is unsafe because there is no certain way of storing the waste for centuries and ensuring it does not pollute the environment. The coastal storage site used to be occupied by four East German nuclear power plants. It is being redeveloped as a landing point for Siberian natural gas transported under the Baltic Sea by pipeline. Between the coastal cities of Rostock and Stralsund, a 10- centimetre-thick layer of ballast stone was pulled away from underneath the rails on a 30-metre stretch of track overnight, a police spokesman said. Police repaired the damage.
