MORE than 1,000 anti-nuclear protesters threw stones and petrol bombs at police guarding a shipment of nuclear waste in northern Germany yesterday as a massive campaign of civil disobedience gathered pace.
Three hundred demonstrators were arrested after a group of masked protesters attacked police near a railway station at Dannenberg, where the highly radioactive waste arrived on Monday from southern Germany.
The nuclear waste is due to travel to miles by road today to a storage site at Gorleben but farmers have blocked roads with tractors, logs and burning barricades. In a move reminiscent of Britain's Newbury by-pass protest, a group of protesters tunneled under the road in the hope of weakening its foundations.
The shipment arrived in Dannenberg eight hours behind schedule on Monday after anti-nuclear activists sabotaged railway lines and cemented themselves to the track.
The Christian Democratic Party of the Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, yesterday condemned the protests, which are supported by almost the entire community near Gorleben.
"The violent blockades against the nuclear waste shipment are an outrageous abuse of the right to demonstrate. Everyone is entitled to peaceful protest but no one has the right to dig under roads, saw through railway tracks and throw grappling hooks on to overhead railway lines," the CDU general secretary, Mr Peter Hintze, said.
Mr Hintze warned Germany's Green Party that its support for the protest risked placing them on the same side as law-breakers and anarchists. But the Green leader, Mr Jurgen Trittin, accused the government of ignoring public opinion and called for an end to nuclear power.
"The state cannot in the long run afford an energy policy that makes it necessary for so many police officers to be mobilised. This is not consensus, but nonsense," he said.
More than 30,000 police officers have been deployed to protect the waste.
The Greens called yesterday for a referendum in Germany on nuclear power. Mr Trittin said that, bin the meantime, power stations should store their own nuclear waste.
"If you don't know where to put nuclear waste, then you have to stop further waste shipments," he said.
The six giant containers of waste were unloaded from a train at Dannenberg yesterday and transferred to special trucks. But the police will almost certainly have to find a new route to Gorleben due to the blockade.
Each truck weighs more than 100 tons and tunneling beneath the road may have made it impassable.
Conservative politicians accused the police of moving too gently against the protesters but the interior minister of the local state of Lower Saxony insisted the shipment would arrive safely at Gorleben, even if it was delayed.
