Blockade of nuclear power station at Grohnde in Germany

antinuclear protestors block traffic

anti nuclear protestors abseil from nearby bridge to nuclear power station with banner

Several hundreds of people protested today, Sunday October 2, 2011 in Grohnde (Lower Saxony). After a demonstration the access roads to the NPP are blockaded by climbing activists who abseiled from a highway

bridge. They are supported by some 50 activists blockading the road and an operating track with a sit-in. A second access road is blocked by an announced and permitted anti-nuclear concert in front of the atomic power station. Though police new about the action day, they could not prevent the blockades.

With speeches at the railway station a few kilometers from the Grohnde atomic power station the rally started with several hundreds of people. Many tractors and other vehicles accompanied the demonstration showing the farmers protest against the dangerous facility. Arrived at the NPP speakers with several NGOs, activists and foreign anti-nuclear campaigners informed about the threats connected to the Grohnde NPP and other atomic power in general and demanded the immediate phase-out of all nuclear facilities worldwide.

Afterwards an anti-nuclear concert was started on a stage in front of the NPP's cooling towers to be continued the whole night.

Several anti-nuclear organizations had provided information stalls besides the main access road to the nuclear power plant, coffee and other drinks were provided as well as vegan food for the protesters that are supposed to stay at the NPP site for 24 hours. A big meadow was provided for individual tents as well as a big circus tent has been set up for the activists. The anti-nuclear concert next to the main access road blocks this street to the NPP as there are so many people to join the music.

Police still behaves calm and didn't intervene much when the access roads to the Grohnde NPP were set up. Around 5 PM CET the first blockade was set up at a highway bridge crossing another access road to the nuclear site. They abseiled with banners demanding the total nuclear phase-out and an end of the uranium industry that provides the nuclear power stations with fuel. One hour later a smaller blockade of a couple of people was set up with a chair and a sign saying "sit out Grohnde" ("Grohnde AUSsitzen") on the road stopping police cars being supposed to support the police forces dealing with the abseiling action. A sit-in blockade on an industrial track and on the road beneath the bridge supported the climbing action with up to
50 people on the ground.

Four hours after the abseiling blockade action started the access road is still blockaded.

Around 9.40 PM CET a message was send from the stage to the audience and police objecting to their order to open the main access road for the NPP workers' verhicles. They read out the official demonstration
orders made by the police beforehand only forcing the street to be opened for emergency vehicles on short notice if necessary. Thus, the anti-nuclear protesters argue, they don't have to clear the road just for the workers, and they won't do so. After a couple of minutes the police unit that had tried to force to open the road went off.

A couple of minutes later police rudely pushed blockaders from the road next to the blockaded bridge to send a couple of workers' cars to the nuclear power plant for the shift change. No one has been hurt yet, although police treated them with rude force. Currently, police is endagering one of the climbing activists by trying to remove their securing ropes.

Around 10 PM CET police ordered the announcer of the demonstration to reduce the demonstration to make it possible for the workers to reach the NPP. Protesters are refusing to follow that order as they believe police has no legal right to change the orders for the demonstration afterwards just to let the workers enter the NPP.



updates and photos:

http://www.greenkids.de/europas-atomerbe/index.php/Blockade_of_the_Grohnde_NPP







Human cost of nuclear power too high - German minister

Reg Illingworth attended the AGM of the nuclear corporation RWE, at which protestors stood up and shouted, waving banners and placards saying Shut them down.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/email/idUKTRE73L1LU20110422

Germany decides to shut down aging nuclear power plants

European Commissioner for Energy Guenther Oettinger addresses the media after a hastily convened meeting of energy ministers, nuclear regulators and industry officials in Brussels, Tuesday, March 15, 2011

Earlier Tuesday, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said that seven reactors that went into operation before 1980 would be offline for three months while Europe's biggest economy reconsiders its plans to extend the life of its atomic power plants.


One of them, the Neckarwestheim I reactor, would remain shut down for good. Residents said living in the shadow of the 35-year-old nuclear plant is making them increasingly nervous in the wake of the events in Japan.

"It must be switched off," 32-year-old Anja Pfau told AP Television News as she pushed her 5-month-old boy along the street in a pram. "There are enough alternative energies like water power and solar energy."

A previous government decided a decade ago to shut all 17 German nuclear reactors by 2021, but Merkel's administration last year moved to extend their lives by an average 12 years. That decision was suspended for three months.

Protests continue at Gorleben nuclear waste storage facility

Hundreds of anti-nuclear activists sat or lay on the railway tracks in Harlingen near Dannenberg on November 8, 2010. German police detained about 800 protesters who refused to leave the tracks after more than 3,000 protestors blocked the tracks on Sunday disrupting a shipment of eleven Castor rail containers of reprocessed German nuclear waste to the storage dump in Gorleben.


Photo: REUTERS/Christian Charisius




16 Nov 2010.
Protests near Gorleben have died down but not stopped. Demonstrations against the German government's nuclear power policy continued as protesters marched near the Gorleben waste storage site. But one provocative author came up with a racier way to block a nuclear power law.

Several hundred protestors have gathered near the Gorleben nuclear waste storage facility in northern Germany on Sunday to demonstrate against plans to extend the period the site can be used as a storage site.

Hours after the shipment of nuclear waste arrived at Gorleben on Tuesday, the state government of Lower Saxony began exploring the possibility of using the former salt mine for longer-term nuclear waste storage.

The renewed protests come after demonstrators successfully delayed the shipment of nuclear waste to Gorleben from France last week by blocking road and rail routes on the way.

French police under fire

French police engaging protestors is under scrutiny

Special forces of the French police have come under fire in Germany for taking aggressive action against some protestors in Germany. Photos published by German media show uniformed officers of the French CRS under direction of German federal police engaging protestors.

The German Interior Ministry has admitted that the French police were involved in confrontations with protesters, but said they were merely helping German police contain an emergency situation.
According to an agreement signed in 2008 by several European countries, including France and Germany, police may not actively engage in law enforcement across an international border unless an emergency situation exists.

Racy offer

Meanwhile, provocative German author Charlotte Roche has made German President Christian Wulff a sexual offer should he refuse to sign a law that would extend the life of Germany's nuclear reactors.

Roche is an adamant critic of nuclear power

Roche told the German news magazine Der Spiegel, "I would offer to go to bed with him if he didn't sign it."

Wulff has until the end of the year to decide whether to sign into law a proposal by Chancellor Angela Merkel's government to push back the closure of Germany's 17 nuclear power plants by an average of 12 years. The proposed law has been sent to his office without being voted on by the Bundesrat, Germany's upper house of parliament that represents the German states.

Roche added that she had her husband's approval for the offer and that it was up for the First Lady Bettina Wulff to give her consent.

The author took part in last week's antinuclear protests. She is best known for her 2008 sexually explicit bestseller "Wetlands."

Author: Matt Zuvela (dpa, dapd, AFP)
Editor: Sean Sinico

Boycott Vattenfall in Germany?

The press release (in German) says:

"Don't buy electricity from Vattenfall"

Anti-nuclear activists announce resistance to the re-commissioning of Krümmel and Brunsbüttel

Regarding the plans of Vattenfall to re-commission the ailing nuclear power plants of Krümmel and Brunsbüttel, Jochen Stay, spokesperson of the anti-nuclear organisation .ausgestrahlt, declares:

"I can only warn Vattenfall from re-commissioning Krümmel and Brunsbüttel. Nobody in northern Germany would understand that, and the last three years, during which these stations have been shut down, show,
that the electricity of these stations is not needed.

Now Vattenfall once again wants to profit from these dangerous plants, at the expense of the general public. We will organise resistance against this. The first step will be that we will call on the clients of Vattenfall to look for a different supplier for their electricity.“

Already in April 120,000 people demonstrated with a 120km human chain for the permanent shut down of Krümmel and Brunsbüttel.

http://www.ausgestrahlt.de/

Vattenfall is a large Swedish electricity company with nuclear power plants in Sweden and Germany. See at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vattenfal

Germans Protest Nuclear Plants

By REUTERS
Published: September 18, 2010

BERLIN (Reuters) — Tens of thousands of Germans surrounded Chancellor Angela Merkel’s office on Saturday in an antinuclear demonstration that organizers said was the biggest of its kind since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986.

The protest, which organizers said drew 100,000 people, could help to mobilize growing grass-roots opposition to Mrs. Merkel’s center-right coalition, which has suffered a slump in popularity since taking office last October.

Near the start of the protest, the police said there were close to 40,000 demonstrators. They declined to give a later estimate.

In a peaceful march around Berlin’s government quarter, protesters converged on Mrs. Merkel’s chancellery to call for a stop to her plans to extend the life spans of nuclear power stations by an average of 12 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/pages/todayspaper/index.html

Nuclear protesters in Germany form 120-kilometer human chain

Opponents of nuclear power joined hands to form a 120-kilometer human chain across northern Germany. They were protesting Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to revoke a law that would shut down nuclear plants by 2020.

Tens of thousands of people attended demonstrations on Saturday aimed at protesting the German government's plans to extend the lives of its nuclear power plants.

Demonstrators formed a 120-kilometer (74-mile) human chain that stretched from a nuclear power plant in Brunsbuettel, near the city of Koblenz, through Hamburg along the Elbe River to another plant in Kruemmel, on the North Sea.

Kruemmel was the site of two minor nuclear accidents in 2007 and 2009.

Police in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein told the AFP news agency that there were "clearly more than 100,000 participants." Organizers estimated the total number at about 120,000.
"Today over 120,000 people have signaled to the government: You must change your pro-nuclear position," event spokesman Thorben Becker told the DPA news agency.

Demonstrations also took place at an atomic waste storage site in the town of Ahaus in North Rhine-Westphalia and at a nuclear plant in the state of Hessen.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said that her center-right coalition wants to revoke a law passed under Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's center-left coalition that promised to shut down all nuclear power plants in Germany by 2020.

Merkel's government has called nuclear energy a "bridge technology" that helps the country keep its commitments to lowering carbon dioxide emissions.

The protests come just days before Monday's 24th anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.

 Deutsche Welle - 24.04.2010