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Castor locomotive leaves Nordenham harbor.
The nuclear waste came from the UK reprocessing plant in Sellafield
Photo: Sina Schuldt / dpa
A train with six castors full of highly radioactive nuclear waste left the port of Nordenham in Lower Saxony for Hesse on Tuesday evening.
According to the Oldenburg police, the AFP news agency reported that the castors were loaded onto the train from a freighter.
They are to be brought to an interim storage facility in the decommissioned Biblis nuclear power plant north of Mannheim.
Protests announced
The 600 meter long train with six castors is expected to arrive there on Wednesday morning.
Nuclear power opponents were on site in Nordenham and had announced protests along the possible routes to the south.
It is criticized that the transport takes place without "information to those responsible for disaster control in the event of an accident".
According to their own statements, the federal police are therefore securing several railway lines in Lower Saxony and Hesse, but also in Bremen and North Rhine-Westphalia.
In the past, the Castor transports were often accompanied by large protests with blockades of the tracks.
The part of the route to Bremen went "according to plan and so far without any problems," said the police in Oldenburg.
The garbage in the castors comes from the reprocessing of fuel elements in the reprocessing plant in Sellafield, UK; the Federal Republic is contractually obliged to take it back.
It is the first Castor transport in Germany in nine years.
According to opponents of nuclear power, four more such transports are planned until 2024.
The Castor transport was originally supposed to take place in spring, but it was postponed due to the corona pandemic.
Decentralized interim storage facilities replace Gorleben
In 2002 it was decided not to bring the nuclear waste from the reprocessing of German fuel elements abroad to an interim storage facility in Gorleben in Lower Saxony.
The transports to the controversial location were regularly accompanied by days of protests, some of which were violent.
Instead, it was agreed to distribute the remaining castors to interim storage facilities that have since been created at the German nuclear power plants.
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bah / dpa / AFP