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Foil-wrapped radioactive parts to be dumped in Germany
Diet Simon - 31.12.2006 02:45
A German anti-nuclear group claims that unpackaged or at best foil-wrapped radioactive plant components are to be taken to an interim depository at Ahaus, near the city of Münster and near the Dutch border.
The group, SOFA Münster, writes in a media release that the Münster District Government (Bezirksregierung Münster) does not reveal from which German nuclear power stations this atomic waste is to come. Moreover, says the group, in October 2006 the operator of the Ahaus interim depository BZA (a subsidiary of the large power companies) filed an application with the Federal Radiation Protection Agency (BfS) for permission to store in Ahaus 270 steel containers with highly radioactive vitrified waste from the reprocessing plant in La Hague, France.
Such waste usually goes to the northern German village of Gorleben, each consignment costing about 50 million euros for the up to 20,000 police guarding it from protesters. Nuclear opponents want to keep policing costs high as a wake-up call to the public and politicians.
Although the sites are hundreds of kilometres apart, Ahaus and Gorleben protesters cooperate closely and usually have groups at each other’s activities.
It is now clear, say the Ahaus activists, that come what may, the nuclear industry intends to fill the existing light construction hall there with waste up to the ceiling, regardless of what kind it is and where it’s from.
If the licence for the 270 canisters is granted, says SOFA Münster, “that would mean several hundred atomic waste transports to the Ahaus light construction hall in the coming years”.
“Ahaus could become a final depository because there is no safe final repository in the world yet and in human assessment there is never likely to be one.
“So why new atomic waste transports? Because the Ahaus interim storage is still 90% empty after 15 years of successful resistance. That’s why we’re taking to the streets in Münster against the licensing plans of the district government.
“As the licensing authority, the Münster District Government is playing the expected shoddy role in this manoeuvre, because it appears that no one there knows anything,” says their release.
It continues: “In a letter to the UWG Ahaus [an independent voters’ list] the district government writes that the places of origin of the waste applied for are irrelevant to the licensing procedure.
“It would ‘still have to be examined’ whether the construction of the hall needed to be changed, it wrote.
“A ‘possible participation of the population’ in the licensing procedure also needed to be ‘investigated’. In other words: We don’ know nuttin’ and don’ wanna know nuttin’ and are ‘checkin’ out’ everything.”
The release says research by anti-nuclear initiatives has discovered, however, that atomic waste for Ahaus must be expected, for example, from the shut down Würgassen nuclear power plant on the Weser River [ http://www.eon-kernkraft.com/frameset_german/nuclear-power-plant/nuclear-power-plant_locations/energy_nuclearpower_kkwuergassen.jsp].
“For everything else the atomic industry wants a blank cheque for generally depositing atomic waste in Ahaus ‘from ongoing operation and the shut down of German atomic power stations’. The limitation to 10 years applied for is just eyewash to try to stop people thinking that Ahaus could become a final depository. And even in the ‘best’ case the atomic waste would be senselessly carted through the country every few years – and we all know: every nuclear transport is one too many!”
SOFA Münster are organising a demonstration on 3 February, to begin at 1 p.m. on the Prinzipalmarkt outside the district government in Münster. Two motorcades through the Münsterland to the demo are planned, one from Ahaus, the other from the Ruhr region.
Uranium issues
Other issues at the demo will be uranium enrichment and uranium transports, SOFA Münster claiming that much resistance has stirred against them in 2006 from Pierrelatte in southern France to Gronau and from Gronau to Lake Baikal in Siberia.
Gronau, also near Münster and the Netherlands, is the location of Germany’s only uranium enrichment plant. One of its supply lines is from Pierrelatte.
Train consignments of uranium run every two or three weeks through the densely populated Rhineland, the Ruhr region and western Münsterland to Gronau. They used to be secret but activists have been successfully targeting them along the route of late.
The depleted uranium waste is railed from Gronau through Münster to Rotterdam in the Netherlands and shipped from there to Russia where it’s “dumped on a meadow”, says SOFA.
Other nuclear waste from Gronau was already transported to the drum storage in Gorleben.
Just a few kilometres away from Gronau in the Netherlands there is another uranium enrichment plant at Almelo. Both plants and one in Britain are owned by Urenco, a trinational operator, whose German component is owned by power companies.
Uranium enrichment is made possible by uranium mining in Australia, Africa and north America.
“It serves only the construction of weapons and the continued operation of atomic power stations,” says SOFA on its website. “In Germany [the power companies] RWE and E.ON make money from uranium enrichment.”
Criminalisation of opponents
SOFA writes that police in the Münsterland area and elsewhere constantly criminalise nuclear opponents. “It’s an everyday part of atomic policy.”
“Central roles in the criminalisation of environmental protection activists in the Münsterland are played by the police presidium in Münster, the state protection police and the public prosecuting authority based there.”
“It’s not the people defending themselves against atomic installations, but the atomic industry and the politicians who licence atomic projects that despise human beings who should be in the dock.”
 sofa-ms@web.de http://www.sofa-ms.de
 E-Mail: sofa-ms@web.de  Website: http://www.sofa-ms.de
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| Read more about: natuur, dier en mens | | supplements | | Continue nuclear power, says German premier | Diet Simon - 31.12.2006 05:43
One of Germany’s most prominent conservative politicians wants the agreement between government and the power industry to end nuclear power production to be scrapped.
The premier of Lower Saxony state, Christian Wulff, of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU), said in his New Year’s address that he favours “a creative interpretation” of the coalition agreement at national level with the co-governing Social Democrats, which confirms the arrangements to end nuclear power.
Wulff wants the pact to end nuclear power by 2021 reversed in two steps. “Until the 2009 federal election no nuclear power station has to be taken off the grid under the agreement,” said the regional politician widely tipped as a future national CDU leader.
To avoid closures of nuclear reactors before the 2009 poll, he said, the unused power production contingent of the shut down Mülheim-Kärlich station (125 km northwest of Frankfurt on Main) should be transferred to other stations. Following strong resistance by local people from the beginning, Mülheim-Kärlich was taken off the grid in 1988 after only 13 months of operation.
Wulff said in his broadcast message that he didn’t want “an exit for ideological reasons when all the countries surrounding us are extending the operating times” of their nukes.
Lower Saxony contains Gorleben, a village of 800 where the nation’s highly-active nuclear waste is stored in a hall opponents deride as no safer than a potato barn, and where a salt deposit has been explored as a possible final repository.
Exploration was stopped over scientific concerns that the salt was not safe. Wulff – and Chancellor Merkel – want it resumed.
The only right thing to do was to end the exploration moratorium of the previous Social Democrat-Greens government, he said.
Wulff was sceptical of the announcement by environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, of the co-governing Social Democratic Party, also to explore other sites for suitability as final dumps.
Although the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Berlin don’t agree on nuclear policy, Gabriel also says the salt deposit in Gorleben is geologically suitable for a final nuclear waste depository but other locations will be considered. ( http://de.indymedia.org/2006/12/164780.shtml)
“The findings so far about a dense rock cover and hence the barrier function of the salt were positively confirmed,” wrote Gabriel, in response to an open letter from opponents of nuclear installations in the north German village.
Wulff said in his address, “From our point of view, other locations will be seriously considered only after the exploration of Gorleben is finished and it turns out to be unsuitable.”
Gorleben nuclear opponents allege that every new consignment of highly active nuclear waste into a hall cheek-by-jowl with the exploratory mine makes permanent dumping in Gorleben more likely. So does the difficulty of shifting the waste yet again to any other location, given that every transport costs about 50 million euros to police.
Last month 12 so-called Castor caskets brought to Gorleben raised to 80 the number in a prefabricated concrete hall protesters say is vulnerable to air attack. Almost 140 are to be there ultimately. Activists claim that every Castor casket contains significantly more radioactivity than an Hiroshima bomb.
The Gorleben exploration mine is situated about 2 km south of the Elbe River. Two shafts 933 m and 840 m deep are situated in the centre of the Gorleben salt dome, which is approximately 14 km long and 4 km wide. The top of the salt dome (salt wash surface) is about 250 m below the surface, the salt dome base lies at depths between 3,200 m and 3,400 m. ( http://www.dbe.de/index.php?id=392&L=2).
| | Activists warn against nuclear renaissance | Diet Simon - 02.01.2007 14:15
German nuclear opponents want to fight against the “propaganda of a renaissance of atomic power” in the new year.
“We must keep making clear in the public awareness that atomic waste is illegally produced and kept in interim storages,” the chairman of the Anti-Atom-Bürgerinitiative Süddeutschland (South German Anti-Nuclear Citizens Initiative), Raimund Kamm, told the news agency dpa.
He recalled that last year the group had managed to take the storage of nuclear waste into the Federal Constitutional Court, Germany’s supreme court.
Now Germany’s highest court would have to make a precedent ruling about interim storage of nuclear waste, Kamm said.
“The operators of nuclear power stations are trying to talk up a renaissance of nuclear power,” he said, and it was feared that the operating times of German nuclear stations could be extended.
Under an agreement reached between power companies and the previous government, nuclear power production is to end in Germany in 2021. The present government is trying to undo that pact.
Kamm pointed out that currently 437 nuclear power stations are operating in the world and 29 new ones are being built.
Nuclear opponents argue that nuclear energy production, which produces radioactive leftovers, is not needed.
“We have the triple-E alternative,” Kamm said, “save energy, use energy more efficiently and produce energy from renewable sources.”
With more that 650 members, the Anti-Atom-Bürgerinitiative is the biggest anti-nuclear group in southern Germany, Kamm claims.
Apart from ending nuclear power production it also demands a speed limit on German autobahns as part of an ecological climate protection policy.
Website: http://www.augsburger-allgemeine.de/Home/Nachrichten/Bayern/sptnid,7_puid,1_regid,2_arid,863629.html
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