15,000 Police Deploy for Anti-Nuclear Protest

Germany mounted one of its biggest peacetime security operations to thwart protesters’ efforts to keep a shipment of nuclear waste from reaching a storage site in the north.

A total of 15,000 police were deployed, but police and protesters said that fewer people than expected had joined the demonstrations against the return of German nuclear waste from France. Police spent an hour removing two protesters who had chained themselves to the rails near the town of Lueneburg.

By late afternoon, the radioactive cargo had reached Dannenberg, near the end of its 750-mile trip from a reprocessing plant in France.

Germany signed an agreement this year with power companies to shut down all the country’s nuclear plants within 20 years. But campaigners say the waste storage site and the shipments--which are to end by 2005--aren’t safe. They want the shipments halted sooner.