A week and a half before the next 12 Castor containers of atomic waste are to enter the Gorleben repository, Greenpeace have blocked its gate.
About 20 anti-nuclear activists placed a seven-and-a-half-tonne block of black steel and concrete in front of it, said a spokeswoman.
The five-metre long and 2.5-metre high item the protesters call a memorial showed the heads of the chairmen of the four leading German electricity corporations chiseled into concrete.

A message on it said the memorial was dedicated to the “concrete-heads turning Gorleben into a nuclear dump.”

Inside the just under one-metre broad block were several Greenpeace activists trying trying to screw it fast from inside.

“We hope the police won’t get us out of here so fast,” said spokeswoman Ortrun Albert.
Greenpeace wanted to draw attention with the action to the Gorleben salt deposit not being a suitable storage place for highly radioactive waste.
“E.on, RWE, Vattenfall Europe and EnBW are only interested in the cheapest possible final storage, not in the safest possible,” said Greenpeace nuclear expert, Thomas Breuer.
He said the salt plug is not impervious. The companies so far had prevented the search for an alternative location.
The anti-nuclear activists expect the next Castor train to leave the French plutonium factory at La Hague on 6 November. The waste is expected in Gorleben two days later.

Trial drillings from 1979 to 1981 led by the geologists Klaus Duphorn have shown that the demanded stone cover on 7.5 square kilometres does not exist.
In this socalled “Gorleben channel” rubble and ground water lie directly on the salt. It could therefore not be ruled out that radioactive particles would enter drinking water.
A concrete hall above ground has been receiving highly radioactive waste since 1995.
Although prominent geologists have warned since the 80s against making the salt plug the permanent was repository, the nuclear industry had sunk about 1.25 billion euros into an wexploratory mine by the end of 2002.
“The atomic industry is trying to create facts here and is ruthlessly asserting its interests. Scientific findings or the justified worries of the population don’t concern them at all,” explains Breuer. He says that with every transport into the hall,. The industry and the government are trying to cement Gorleben as the final repository, the environmentalists fear.
Greenpeace points out that the federal environment minister, Jürgen Trittin of The Greens, has stated repeatedly that he’d table a law during this legislative session (until 2006) about finding a final repository, but at half-time there’s no sign of it.
“The search for an alternative final dump will cost several hundred million euros that the power companies don’t want to pay although they produced the waste. Trittin hasn’t had the guts so far to start the lawmaking process for this,” says Breuer. “This failure is irresponsible. Following next generations are going to have to live with the problems nuclear power companies and politicians are causing us now.”

(Translated by Diet Simon)