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Only German uranium enrichment plant might close
Diet Simon - 08.09.2011 20:13
Activists fighting Germany’s only uranium enrichment factory see chances of it being closed down improving as three major owners of it try to pull out. Media have reported that the behemoth power companies RWE and Eon want to sell their stakes in Urenco, which has German, Dutch and British owners. The British government is also said to be thinking about selling its shares and the Dutch don’t look like wanting to increase theirs.
Urenco also has plants in Holland and the UK. Their German one is located in Gronau, central northwest Germany, near the city of Münster. The Gronau opponents think the French Areva and the Russian Rosatom might be interested in any shares that become available. No one else looks interested. The activists think the German anti-monopolies authority would probably disallow Areva and Britain wouldn’t want the Russians in the company.
“Both RWE and Eon are in debt and in recent years invested only in dinosaur technologies like coal and nuclear power,” writes an alliance of anti-nuclear organizations called SofA Münster. “Now the changeover to renewable energies is to be funded by selling off some of their operations. That RWE und Eon have lost interest in Urenco – which even after Fukushima still described itself as an enterprise with a future – is also due to our consistent protests.” Urenco also supplied Tepco, the company that owns the power stations massively leaking radioactivity in Japan after the earthquake and tsunami.
“An insider told media that there was not much joy in owning Urenco shares because of constant protests against the company – at shareholder congresses, at uranium transports and recently with 15,000 people.”
“What else does anyone expect about a company that exports its uranium waste to Russia, keeps having accidents and has no security plans in case anything goes wrong.”
SofA calls on the government of Social Democrats and Greens in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where Gronau is located, to immediately close down Urenco, forbid the dangerous uranium transports and stop plans to build a storage facility for 60,000 tonnes of uranium waste.
The activists are calling people to a protest camp near the Gronau plant on the 17th and 18th of September. Russian protesters are expected to take part.
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