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German Greens have lost anti-nuclear bite
Diet Simon - 29.01.2005 16:52
Germany’s Greens have lost their anti-nuclear bite, says the Junge Welt newspaper in a review of the party’s 25th anniversary ( http://www.jungewelt.de/2005/01-13/018.php). It was one of several publications putting forth that view. The following is a collation of recent nuclear and anti-nuclear developments in Germany.
In 1990 Social Democrat Gerhard Schröder (now German chancellor) and Jürgen Trittin (Greens), now his environment minister, then an energetic opponent of nuclear power, formed a coalition in Lower Saxony, Junge Welt recalled, but the enthusiasm of The Greens to oppose nuclear plants in the state as part of the government soon lamed. The article traces how many anti-nuclear Greens, especially around Gorleben, the waste dump location, left the party in disgust, “including the mother of the Wendland resistance, Marianne Fritzen.” In a ‘word of greeting from the resistance’ to the party’s birthday congress the anti-nuclear activists accused The Greens of having abandoned their earlier convictions. Whereas they were once the elongated arm of the anti-nuclear movement in the parliaments, the message from Gorleben and Ahaus resistance groups said, as a government party The Greens themselves now ordered anti-nuclear activists beaten up in giagantic police deployments. Never before, said the activists, had the operators of nuclear power stations had such worryless times.
The mass circulation and conservative Bild Zeitung, read by millions, mocked The Greens polemically on their birthday. Under the heading “Why we love them so much” it had things like “chicken cages will in future be bigger than children’s rooms, men have leant to piss sitting down, many cycle paths are already broader than roads.” It had 25 such distortions. http://www.bild.t-online.de/BTO/news/2005/01/13/gruene__geburtstag/gruene__geburtstag__25.html
Earthquake expert, Professor Gerhard Jentzsch of Jena University, says a nuclear power station at Neckarwestheim, 40 km north of Stuttgart, is threatened by earthquakes. He says the danger is being created by the method of building an underground storage for the station’s waste on its site. He told a public meeting that the official expertises done in 2002 before building of the dump began assume “the wrong class of soil”. The Neckarwestheim area is earthquake-prone. The meeting heard that like the 18 nuclear power stations operating in Germany, the “interim storage” will not be safe from crashing aircraft. http://www.rbi-aktuell.de/Umwelt/18012005-06/18012005-06.html
Trittin has removed a high-carat nuclear safety expert, Eberhard Grauf, from his reactor safety commission at the behest of the giant power company, Energie Baden-Württemberg (EnBW). Grauf was a vocal critic of safety precautions at EnBW’s Neckarwestheim nuclear power station. There’s guessing over Trittin’s motives, because three months ago he couldn’t do without Grauf’s advice. Trittin has upset many of his allies by the decision, including senior officials in his ministry, in the commission and among anti-nuclear activists. The leftwing daily Tageszeitung accused Trittin of “caving in yet again to the nuclear industry” and on internet forums the question is being asked, “Is Trittin vulnerable to blakmail?” file:///c:/MY%20TEXTS/ANTI-NUCLEAR/Other%20German/857163.htm
Trittin has rejected as “counter-productive and blindly actionistic” the call by Baden-Württemberg state to set up an expert group to concern itself with a nuclear waste final storage site in neighbouring Switzerland. Such a group, to examine possible effects on Germany of a dump near the border was meaningless at this time, Trittin said. He said he noted with interest that the state government in Stuttgart was in favour of intensive examinations in remoter geological formations and added it would be consistent if Baden-Wuerttemberg finally dropped its rigid attachment to Gorleben. He called on Stuttgart to support the kind of final dump selection process among several German sites his ministry wanted to start. http://www.verivox.de/news/ArticleDetails.asp?aid=6059&pm=1
Conservative politicians responsible for putting the waste storage facilities into Gorleben have rejected Trittin’s claim that the salt mine explored at great expense as a potential final dump is an “illegal” building. They demand to know whether the government shares Trittin’s publicly stated view. They allege Trittin is trying to destroy nuclear disposal structures and pass the responsibility on to following generations. http://www.verivox.de/news/ArticleDetails.asp?aid=5643&pm=1
A court in Münster has revised a judgement against an anti-nuclear activist and imposed a fine of 500 euros to be paid to a women’s project in Ahaus. The man blockaded the Ahaus waste dump in 2003 and was ordered by a lower court to pay 1,500 euros for coercion and resisting state authorities. A spokesman for the man’s resistance group claimed that the accusations of the prosecution had “simply collapsed” and it was important that the appellate court had established that the blockade did not constitute coercion. Although 500 euros was still a lot of money, he welcomed the ruling because it avoided a formal conviction. http://www.taz.de/pt/2005/01/21/a0005.nf/text.ges,1
Lüneburg state attorneys ordered the homes of five anti-nuclear activists in Hamburg and Bremen searched for “derailing aids” during the rail transport of waste to Gorleben in November. “Nothing worth noting was found,” said the attorneys. The search resulted from police stopping the five in their car near railway tracks on the route to Gorleben on 8 November and finding three metal parts in it. They’d found similar parts at three other places along the line and the authorities alleged they might have been used to derail the locomotive of the waste train. The five spent the night in police custody while their homes were searched. http://www.taz.de/pt/2005/01/14/a0156.nf/text.ges,1
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