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Litigation to stop Ahaus nuclear trucking
Diet Simon - 21.04.2004 14:05
The North-Rhine Westphalian (NRW) state government is litigating to try to stop 18 truck transports of nuclear waste more than 600 kilometres from Dresden in the east to Ahaus near the Dutch border in the west.
The Bonn law firm Redeker, specialists in administrative law, has been employed to challenge the permit for the trucking issued at the end of March by the Salzgitter-based Federal Office for Radiation Protection (BfS). This was announced after an NRW cabinet meeting in Bielefeld on Tuesday.
MTR-2 Castors in Rossendorf (Dresden).
The BfS is answerable to Jürgen Trittin, the national environment minister and member of The Greens, who has said truck haulage of the Castor caskets might start next month.
If the permit were upheld, NRW said, it would file a suit in the administrative court in Braunschweig.
But the NRW interior minister, Fritz Behrens, a Social Democrat, has also instructed the police presidium in Münster, which has jurisdiction for Ahaus, to start preparing police protection for the 18 truck runs. The last 200 kilometres of the route are in NRW.
He said the state was forced to do this because there is a legally valid transport permit for the 951 spent fuel rods from a switched off experimental reactor at Rossendorf, just outside Dresden.
NRW estimates that policing 18 truck runs would cost 50 million euros. Behrens has presented calculations based on previous rail transports that in this case would amount to 30 million euros to be shared between all the federal states traversed. The “unnecessary and expensive assignment of thousands of police is irresponsible,” Behrens said. He and others in the NRW government have previously cited heightened security risks after the terrorist bombings in Madrid.
NRW environment minister, Bärbel Höhn, of The Greens, says “the permit can be refused if the method of transportation is not in the predominant public interest – and it certainly isn’t with the 18 transports.” Höhn has said she expects the litigation to succeed.
NRW Premier, Peer Steinbrück (Social Democrat) has also spoken out against the transports, arguing that the public would not accept the 50 million euros cost.
The law firm has been instructed to explore all possible litigation options. "A suit in the administrative court against immediate execution of the transport permit by the BfS seems to me to have the best prospects,” Höhn said.
"This permit encroaches so severely on the interests of our state – the security costs would be extremely high for NRW – that one can say, here the federation and a federal state are one-sidedly offloading burdens at the cost of North-Rhine Westphalia.”
"We accept that under present atomic law Saxony [Dresden] doesn’t have to build a new interim storage facility. But we don’t accept that the transportation is permitted in a way that creates excessive costs and high security risks that are loaded disproportionately on to our shoulders.”
Höhn also suggests that NRW bill Saxony for its police costs. A expert is to look into costs liability. "The usual thing was always to bill the client for accompanying the transports,” she says, “so we’re now checking whether this might also be valid for securing 18 transports – in particular as we’ve got the most difficult part of the route to deal with in security terms – the last 200 kilometres to the interim storage [Ahaus].”
According to the Rheinische Post newspaper in Düsseldorf, Höhn wants to charge the electricity producers 52 euros per started hour per police member for guarding the transports. The paper says interior minister Behrens doesn’t think that’s very effective. Höhn said she would “fight with all my strength” to stop the transports happening at all.
Local opponents this week demanded an end to all nuclear waste transports to Ahaus and called for legal action to stop the operation of the storage facility. The initiative "Kein Atommüll in Ahaus" said litigating against the transports was not enough. Anti-nuclear groups in Dresden, Ahaus and the Münsterland region have said they’ll mount massive protests against the transports.
Like the NRW government, they demand that spent fuel be kept where it occurs and to set up an interim storage facility in Rossendorf. They argue that the thin-walled hall in Ahaus is no safer than the one in Rossendorf holding the waste to be transported.
The environment minister of Saxony, Steffen Flath, a Christian Democrat, has sharply criticised NRW’s litigation. He said his state had no understanding for it. It would only cost money and time and would lead nowhere in the matter as such.
He hoped the court would rule quickly and the transports could happen. He thought the permit would be upheld.
Flath also said it was not up to Bärbel Höhn (NRW) nor himself to decide how the waste would be transported. He repeated an earlier assertion that trucking was applied for because there is no rail connection to the reactor site at Rossendorf. Because only one Castor fitted on a truck, there would have to be 18 consignments.
Officials from the interior ministries of the federal states of North-Rhine Westphalia, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony, Hesse and Thuringia are meeting today, Wednesday, in Düsseldorf to discuss the transports to Ahaus. Also taking part will be the haulage firm Nuclear Cargo Service. One of the subjects will be possible dates.
Meanwhile in Kaiserslautern on Wednesday, Greenpeace activists protested at the main railway station against another rail transport of nuclear waste from Germany to France for reprocessing.
The group says the only sensible alternative to transports is to keep the waste in the grounds of the power stations and when these are full to switch the reactors off.
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