An abseil­ing 27-year-old female activist from France held up a train car­ry­ing over 1000 tonnes of ‘deplet­ed’ ura­ni­um through a dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed region of Ger­many for two hours on Mon­day 27 April, the day after the 23rd anniver­sary of the Cher­nobyl dis­as­ter — the world’s worst ever civ­il nuclear acci­dent.

A 25-car train half a kilo­me­tre long has just car­ried 1,250 tonnes of deplet­ed ura­ni­um through the most dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed region of Ger­many – des­ti­na­tion unknown, pre­sum­ably France. The train left Germany’s only ura­ni­um enrich­ment plant at Gronau (52° 12′, 160 km south of Ham­burg) in the night from 27 to 28 April. Usu­al­ly trains from the Ger­man-Dutch-British-owned enrich­ment plant close to the city of Mün­ster and the Dutch bor­der have tak­en deplet­ed ura­ni­um to Rot­ter­dam for ship­ment to Rus­sia, where it’s been dumped in the open air.

The Ure­n­co com­pa­ny is extreme­ly secre­tive about the trans­ports. This time jour­nal­ists were told by fed­er­al police that the train head­ed for Duis­burg and on to France.

That would have tak­en the dan­ger­ous car­go through the dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed Ruhr and Rhineland areas – if the police infor­ma­tion is cor­rect.

Anti-nuclear activists say they can only spec­u­late what’s to be done with the ura­ni­um waste in France.

They expect it will be processed into ura­ni­um oxide in the Pier­re­lat­te nuclear cen­tre to make it eas­i­er to store. Con­struc­tion of an inter­im stor­age for ura­ni­um oxide has been approved. Activists say it could be decades before the waste is returned to Ger­many.
Very close to Pier­re­lat­te are four pres­surised water reac­tors at Tri­c­as­tin, where ura­ni­um was found in ground water last sum­mer.

The train from Gronau was held up by two hours because a female French activist who lives in Ger­many, 27-year-old Cécile Lecomte, had abseiled over the tracks from a road over­pass. She and oth­er climbers have made such a name for them­selves in dis­rupt­ing nuclear trans­ports that police now always have climb­ing spe­cial­ists along on the trains to take the pro­test­ers down.

In Jan­u­ary last year Lecomte held up a train for near­ly sev­en hours by abseil­ing over its route. This most recent climb­ing action was her third in one and a half years on this non-elec­tri­fied sec­tion of rail­way.

The protest a day after the Cher­nobyl anniver­sary got some pub­lic atten­tion from a demon­stra­tion at Mün­ster cen­tral sta­tion and near the abseil­ing over­pass.

“The aim is to reveal the secret atom­ic trans­ports from the Gronau ura­ni­um enrich­ment plant and to draw people’s atten­tion to the pol­i­cy of Ure­n­co,” she writes. ( http://de.indymedia.org/2009/04/248604.shtml )

“Ure­n­co does not inform peo­ple about these trans­ports and the dan­gers con­nect­ed with them. On the con­trary, peo­ple only get to hear about them when atom­ic pow­er oppo­nents man­age to expose the depar­ture of atom­ic trans­ports by days of pre­cise obser­va­tion. It was first thought [the most recent] con­sign­ment was going to Rus­sia.”

Lecomte writes that she means her action to be a sig­nal against atom­ic pol­i­cy in gen­er­al and expan­sion of the Gronau enrich­ment plant in par­tic­u­lar.

“Radioac­tiv­i­ty knows no bor­ders. What kind of an end to atom­ic pow­er is it if Gronau is expand­ed, there­by sup­port­ing the con­struc­tion of new nuclear plants — such as the EPR in Fla­manville, France – by sup­ply­ing the prod­uct to pow­er sta­tions all over the globe.

“The waste is cart­ed right across Europe in secret trans­ports. That is no solu­tion to the nuclear waste prob­lem. On the con­trary, the pop­u­la­tion is exposed to ever more dan­gers, the envi­ron­ment is pol­lut­ed ever more.

“Atom­ic instal­la­tions need to be switched off imme­di­ate­ly,” Lecomte writes.

Pic­tures of the abseil­ing at http://www.anti-atom-aktuell.de/fotos/2009–04-27_uranzugstopp-haeger/. More about Lecomte’s climb­ing protests at http://www.eichhoernchen.ouvaton.org/deutsch/anti-atom/Luftakrobatik-Atomtransporte.html .

Report from Indy­media Ger­many: http://de.indymedia.org/2009/04/248655.shtml