Germany's shipment of nuclear waste was under way again last night after a 17-hour delay caused by anti-nuclear activists who chained themselves to train tracks.
Police used jackhammers and bolt-cutters to remove two activists from the group, called Robin Wood, one of whom, a 16-year-old girl, had to be hospitalised after spending the night in sub-zero temperatures.
The protesters had attached themselves to the track using chains inside tubes which they had buried in the ground and filled with concrete. "I don't think even these people expected it to last so long," said police spokesman Mr Wolfgang Klages.
The damaged tracks were repaired and the 80-tonne shipment of reprocessed nuclear waste reached the town of Dannenberg last night escorted by helicopters overhead.
This morning the six huge Castor containers will be loaded on to trucks for the last 12-mile leg of the journey by road to a nuclear waste dump in the saltmines of Gorleben, in northern Germany.
Earlier in the day riot police forcibly removed several hundred other protesters from a sitin on the railway line near Dannenberg.
The delay was a huge embarrassment for authorities who posted more than 20,000 police officers to the area to prevent protesters hindering the transport. A police spokesman said two officers were seriously injured in hospital.
Mr Klages said yesterday that more than 600 protesters have been detained since the start of the transport and more than 100 arrested.
German Interior Minister Mr Otto Schily intervened in the stand-off yesterday to say protesters who hindered the shipment would be "severely punished".
"No one has the right to prevent or aggravate the transport," said Mr Schily, adding he was "concerned at the violence on the part of a militant minority".
Germany's Green Party Environment Minister Mr Jurgen Trittin said yesterday the transport of German nuclear waste reprocessed in France was "necessary and imperative".
He had struck a deal with industry to phase out Germany's 19 nuclear reactors by about 2025. But until then, Germany had a moral duty to take back its reprocessed waste, he said.
Anti-nuclear protesters hope to speed up the wind-down of plants by making the transports of reprocessed waste too expensive and too risky.
Mr Trittin, who supported demonstrators during the last shipment in 1997, said he was "upset" by protesters who called him a "traitor to the environmental cause".
Despite growing numbers of protesters, more than 80 percent of Germans don't believe they will be successful in blocking the transport, according to a survey conducted for news magazine Der Spiegel.
Yesterday the left-wing Tageszeitung said the German public was less fired up on the subject of nuclear fuel than in the past. "At the last big nuclear shipment protest, 30,000 people demonstrated, compared to just a few thousand this time," the paper said in an editorial.
