NO NUCLEAR WASTE TO FRANCE! TRUCK FOR TRAIN STOPPED IN GREENPEACE ACTION AGAINST NUCLEAR SHIPMENTS

9 April 2001

Würzburg, Germany - Greenpeace this evening protested new deliveries of nuclear waste from Germany to France at railway sidings in Würzburg. Some eleven environmental activists have chained themselves with steel pipes to a special railway truck which is today supposed to travel to Grafenrheinfeld for loading with nuclear containers intended for reprocessing in France. Another group of activists are displaying banners reading, "no nuclear waste to France" in German and French. Normal rail operations are not being disrupted. Greenpeace is calling for the planned nuclear shipments to be stopped.

The nuclear shipment from the Grafenrheinfeld power plant should not, on legal grounds, be made. An objection by Greenpeace filed with the Federal Office for Radiation Protection, the BfS, still has to be heard and so has had a delaying effect. The immediate enforcement which would be needed for the shipment to be made has not been ordered.

Spent fuel rods from German nuclear power plants are now being taken to France again for the first time since shipments were stopped in 1998. Tomorrow, at the latest, casks of nuclear waste from Biblis, Philippsburg and Grafenrheinfeld are due to form a train at Wörth in North-Rhine Westphalia and be taken to the reprocessing plant at La Hague.

Some 1,250 tonnes of German nuclear waste - about 280 shipments - are supposed to be delivered to La Hague alone. "The public must feel they've been taken for a ride," says Greenpeace's energy expert, Veit Bürger, "with the German government two weeks ago justifying the shipment to Gorleben by saying Germany ought not to be allowed to simply dump its nuclear waste on France's doorstep. Because this is precisely what's happening now. So much radioactive waste irretrievably enters the environment with reprocessing that any talk of national responsibility is absurd."

The reprocessing plant at La Hague is one of the largest sources of radioactive emissions into the environment in the whole of Europe. Even in normal operations the operating company Cogema pumps about 1.4 million litres of radioactive effluent a day down a pipeline directly into the English Channel/La Manche. Greenpeace has in the last few years repeatedly proven that the nuclear factory at La Hague fails to meet French environmental requirements, and these are much more lax than those in Germany. "With every gram of nuclear waste that leaves Germany for La Hague," says Veit Bürger, "the English Channel/La Manche becomes a bit more heavily radioactively contaminated."

Nuclear shipments to La Hague clearly violate current law. The German nuclear energy act stipulates that nuclear waste must be recycled without causing harm. As long ago as 1991 the SPD Social Democrats and Greens demonstrated in a number of studies and reports that reprocessing is not harmless recycling. A press release by the environment ministers in Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and Hesse stated that the La Hague plant would never be permitted in Germany because of the level of radioactive discharges. German electricity companies are La Hague's largest foreign customers. Since the beginning of the 1970s they have sent some 4,500 tonnes, 60 per cent of German nuclear waste, to France.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

Beta SP footage and photos of the action are available free of charge. Please contact press officer Stefan Schurig, tel. +49 (0)40 30618342.
For general queries and further information contact our energy expert, Karsten Smid, tel. +49 (0)171 8780834 or Jean Luc Thierry, Greenpeace France, tel. +33 673895502.

Web sites of Greenpeace in Germany: www.greenpeace.de and international: www.greenpeace.org