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Kai Pfaffenbach / Reuters
A picture taken with a thermal imaging camera shows police (foreground) guarding the train transporting Castor containers, which carry radioactive nuclear waste, during a stop in Neunkirchen near Saarbruecken, Germany, on November 25.
The AP reports from DANNENBERG, Germany:
Alex Domanski / Reuters
Two police officers measure the radiation of a Castor container on a train during a stop in Neunkirchen on November 25.
Demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails at police, setting a vehicle on fire, as skirmishes intensified Friday after a shipment of nuclear waste reprocessed in France crossed into Germany on its way to a controversial storage site.
The clash broke out in the afternoon between about 400 riot police and 300 demonstrators in the woods outside the northern German town of Dannenberg, near the storage facility at Gorleben where the nuclear waste is being transported by train.
Activists in Germany say neither the waste containers nor the Gorleben site, a temporary storage facility, are safe.
The train carrying the annual shipment entered western Germany in the morning after delays in France, where activists damaged railtracks in an attempt to halt the cargo. Read the full story.
Sascha Schuermann / AP
Police try to secure the area where environmental activists attacked a police car near Metzingen, northern Germany, on November 25.
Sascha Schuermann / AP
A group of masked environmental activists dig underneath the railway track in an attempt to halt a train carrying nuclear waste near Metzingen, northern Germany, on Nov. 25.
Leave a Comment:
If a demonstrator throws a Molotov cocktail at a person, he should be shot.
Bring back the East German Iron Curtain guards!
I too was surprised by this. Usually, such action is not taken unless it is a very seriously escalated situation. I wonder if we have the whole story here.
nope, nothing is safe from a determined idiot
Mr Engineer.....full speed ahead!
And how is it...before apprenhension...that we can tell the difference between protestors trying to make a point...and terrorists trying to steal nuclear material?
It would be allot safer if those idiots would quit tearing up the tracks.
Do you folks actually believe that nuclear waste should be traveling across countries via rail, truck, or any method? If the corporations that made the waste can't find a way to recycle it--let them eat it. I'm sick of polluters that want to violate every single tenant of being good shepherds of the land.
They foul the air and water, create massive oil spills and folks say, "drill, baby, drill." That's pure insanity. The 3rd world countries that industries turn to for $.50/hour wages are victims as well.
While I don't agree with their methods, I agree with their message.
@ Sandtrich..if online why worry about it? Takes electric to run your PC and lites, and that electricity is made by nuclear plants where ever you live these days (worry about your own neck of the woods).
sandtrich: I watched a documentary once about the containers the US developed to move nuclear waste by rail. They were essentially big steel boxes. Testing involved running a real train on real tracks at high speed into an enormous concrete block. The train was totaled; the concrete was in pieces; the box was fine.
Maybe the Germans need our boxes?
These people are terrorists and should be summarily executed. 180 grains of lead at 3000 feet per second. Nuff Said.
actually ag99, I think the boxes are the same, tests also include fire for days, being dropped from height onto a single steel spike (for penetration resistance), and many others.
with advanced fast breeder reactors, we could run entirely off of what we currently are trying to bury as waste for several centuries and reduce the quantity of waste by 98%, the remnant would decay completely to background levels in 300 years instead of eons. we can design safe storage for 300 years, but not for millenia. studies of the oklo natural nuclear reactor give good clues as to how buried but uncontained fission products behave over the very long run (appx 2 billion years), very little of fission products traveled very far. the reactors are also inherently self-limiting, meaning they can't have the type of uncontrolled meltdown that happened at chernobyl and fukishima, the reactor just quits if the pumps quit instead of melting down uncontrollably like older designs. also by using the current reactor waste, we wouldn't have to mine for uranium for several centuries.
nuclear for baseline, fallback power, and wind/solar/tidal. etc for everything else we can, and save the oil/coal for plastics and such.
Ouch, Vern! That's pretty short sided. Do those 3000 tons of highly radioactive waste that's gets buried here in the US each year bother you?
Also---I'm exhausted of hearing "nuke em", execute em". The paranoia and xenophobia that exists in the country will be the cause of it's fall. The half ass job that corporations do to insure their method of doing business will not harm us will contribute. The lobbyists line up and the politicians line up at the trough and eat their fill.
What if--that train had derailed or a tanker truck ran a railroad crossing sign? Would it be explained so eloquently as the government of Japan did when they failed to plan and it will be decades before we realize the full damage. When BP killed damn near every living thing in the Gulf--were precautions taken. NO
Think and let's start holding those responsible for the damage they do to our environment. We will pass it on to generations yet to be born. Shouldn't we leave it at least as good as we found it?
danwill: I agree completely. I've long thought nuclear is the way to go, but many people still don't understand the industry or its current technological state. They think we want to build Chernobyl plants all over the place and store its waste forever.
Some people say humanity is neither mature or responsible enough, to effectively use radioactive material. They point to areas such as Chernobyl, Fucushima, Three Mile Island, and others as places we have nearly permanently polluted. They fear that we will create hundreds of other places just like them, wastelands for thousands of years to come. I, however, take a different view. We, as a, hopefully, intelligent species will learn how to use this technology as we learned to control fire...... VERY carefully!
Control fire, eh? If we had the capability to "control" fire, then massive wildfires that destroy entire communities wouldn't happen. People wouldn't burn to death.
This isn't 'The Last Airbender'.
Way to take him literally, he obviously doesn't mean MANIPULATE fire which is what I think your reference to the last airbender meant.
either way, it was a terrible movie
Intelligent species? Is that why television commercials are geared to a 3rd grade level of intelligence? We've built reactors all over the world. Then we had Three Mile. So we built more, but much better. Then we had Chernobyl. So we built more, but much much better. Then we had Japan. At what point exactly will we "learn how to use this technology as we learned to control fire...... VERY carefully!"? Will it be before or after we cook the planet like a wildfire pushed by the Santa Annas through the Hollywood hills?
Don't worry, Iran says they know allot about this stuff, I'm sure they will show us the best way to handle this stuff. I'll bet they have a way of disposing of all the material in Asia minor and Europe. they might even allow Europe to send their waste to Iran, to be prepared for disposal. those activist won't have to worry long.
Chernobyl was a ridiculously old and out-dated design. The thing should have been shut down long before it failed. Three Mile Island was indeed very near a complete disaster, but it's safety systems kept it from becoming a complete meltdown just like they were designed to do. Fukushima was the result of a catastrophic earthquake: I don't care how much technology we humans devise, we will never be able to out engineer mother nature. The last two or three generations in this country have been scared shi**less by misinformation and bimbo's like Jane Fonda. Nuclear power is the answer for now. It's not perfect, but it is the answer. The oil and natural gas folks boast about the fact that if they are allowed to open new fields, they can provide energy for the next 100 years. HELLO! We need power for the next 1000 years. You think this planet has problems now? Wait until the oil runs out.
I would rather live 1/2 a mile from a nuclear power plant than 1/2 a mile from a oil refinery. There have been many more accidents and casualties from oil production than nuclear use and production.
I am sure that the wealth of information we learned form the three disasters, would allow us to make much safer, new nuclear plants. With that being said I still think we should "drill baby drill" and build some new modern refineries.
From what I understand, there are newer designs that really are failsafe. They tend to be smaller facilities, but that just makes them cheaper to build and we can distribute them more widely. And nuclear waste can be recycled in breeder reactors; the rods can be used again. France does this, but apparently it's illegal in the US for fears of proliferating weapons-grade material or something (sounds like a weak argument to me).
Tritium is directly tied to cancer. this substance was not around until nuclear power plants. So much for Responsible.
Oh and what do we do with Tritium? We dump it in our water to "Dilute" it to OSHA standards.
wrong, it was just more rare.
carbon14 has a link to cancer, but you can't do spit about that one, radon can collect in basements and that has an extremely strong link to lung cancer. they still use tritium to make permanent glow in the dark watches and lights. tritium also has a half-life of about 12 years, so the rate that it disappears is also fairly quick
the only real danger from tritium is if it is inhaled or ingested, the beta decay particle produced by it is unusually low in energy and is unable to even penetrate the dead layer of your skin.
These materials can be handled safely. Nuclear reactors may be the only way out of our energy and carbon problems. It's sad that this hysteria about radioactive materials has been built up by various groups.
Burning coal for energy pollutes and is far more dangerous than nuclear power (you can find the statistics on the net). There are new nuclear power plant designs that are much safer than the very old types such as those which were damaged in Japan. The new designs are passively safe, they do not depend on a power-driven cooling system for safety like the old designs do.
Also, radioactive waste can be reprocessed and burned in nuclear reactors so that the final amounts that must be disposed of in long term storage are very small.
Because we do not reprocess waste in the U.S. our nuclear waste is all siting around in open pools of water adjacent to every nuclear reactor. President Carter banned the reprocessing out of fear that plutonium might be stolen by terrorists and used to make a nuclear weapon. However in France, which gets 70% of it's power from nuclear reactors, all waste is reprocessed and has been for decades. Further there are new designs where waste is reprocessed directly in the reactor itself so that it never becomes available in a form that could be used to make weapons.
Currently we are on the road to using more and more coal which releases lots of CO2 and many toxic pollutants such as mercury. Coal mining is dirty and dangerous and is destroying the land where it is mined. We need people to get educated and support nuclear power to have a bright energy future.
quoted for truth , fission is unfortunetly the only way out of our mess, China(and any energy expert that hasn't been bought off with a 1\2 a brain) figured this out years ago and is working to build 50-60 gen 4 and 5 lightwater reactors. They'll will blow us away economically and have a fully electric society and we'll still be arguing about gay marriage.
Mining anything is dirty. Even if you allow reprocessing of waste, you still have nuclear waste to dispose of. Otherwise, why would this train be carrying waste out of France. If we ran everything from nuclear power, we could afford to launch this crap into outer space.
China is nothing but an earthquake ready to happen and with Nuclear reactors ready to go. Japan has tought no one nothing. Iran is next to quake. When you design something to withstand a 9.5 quake it has to rock in motion for many minutes for 10's of feet. Again and again. These designs really can't exist. Think the Japanese inside those plants now aren't a slow pill to death. Think again.
Every one is going Electric everything, where do people think their going to get all this electricity? The enviornmentalist want to breach all the Dams,( scratch Hydro) shut down all the coal plants, oil & gas plants, they hate the wind generators cluttering up the land scape, and killing birds, Solar really isnt that practicle or dependable yet, so what else is their, how are you going to charge up that electric car? or should we just give up and live like cavemen.
blah blah it costs $50,000.00 per pound to put something in space. How much weight do you suppose they have in waste? My estimate says nobody could afford that!
Now what the Hey do these protesters think they will accomplish by Haltin this train?? What is it going to do, Sit on the tracks for ever?
PEOPLE are STUPID!!!
no ,maybe you are moron.
derailing a nuclear waste train...ain't a very good idea... unless your ....in the hazardous waste clean up business...
Imagine the solar, wind, and green technology we could improve with the money saved from expensive nuclear energy production. Conditions on Earth are much too volatile for such dangerous technology to safely operate for very long. Like coal, oil, and gas. It's time to move on to cleaner technologies. We need to regulate these polluting industries out of business and force governments and industry to focus solely on alternative energy.
Imagine the solar,wind and green technology we could improve with the money we could save from Coal/oil production which is 100% more of a problem than nuclear energy.
all it takes is one mistake ,and it will wipe out a state .and you say its safer then cold .what you been drinking
@Mark. Nuclear Power is the second cheapest form of electricity generation. Time to grow a brain stupid.
"concerned" (ahem, your moniker doesn't fit the comment "grow a brain stupid") nuclear plants are very expensive to build initially. and with current plants waste disposal is a huge problem. however, my comment 1.10 gives some ideas with what to do with the current "waste" (it could actually supply power for everyone for several centuries without mining another bit).
thenewstoday, VHTR reactors can be used to mass-produce hydrogen from water using a very efficient thermal process, far more efficient than electrolysis. I like nuclear for baseline production, but I also like wind, solar and other renewable sources wherever and whenever we can use them. coal and oil should be really relegated to the production of petrochemicals and hydrocarbon based materials not just thrown away for fuel.
Would the tree huggers prefer that they just dump the waste right there rather than transport it?
Apparently yes, considering they were trying to derail the train.
Exactly! Kinda stupid of them.
The French have had more experience storing and processing more nuclear waste safely than anyone else on the planet. This is because 70% of their electricity comes from nuclear power.
While people have the right to protest, it seems counter-productive to risk derailing a train loaded with nuclear waste. What is that going to do? What if the sealed containers breach and spill their contents across miles of open country?
Up to this point, the only nuclear accidents that have released any measurable amount of radiation were either due to incompetence (Chernobyl) or natural disasters that would not occur in Europe (Japan - 9.0 quake followed by a record tsunami - really?).
The alternative is dirty forms of coal mining (mountaintop and open pit), deep-sea drilling (hello BP Taconda well?) or some form of fracking that uses and can contaminate massive amounts of water in the drilling for natural gas or oil. Take your pick.
There is no free lunch unless we could run the global economy on hydrogen fuel cells powered by solar and wind energy.
Those containers are the safest containers on the planet, virtually nothing can penetrate them. They are made to withstand derailments and such. Agree with everything else you said though.
if france is so experienced at processing and storing nuclear waste, why are they shipping it to germany? maybe i answered my own question.
People fear the very thought of anything nuclear or radioactive. What people do not know about they fear. What is needed is a public education on nuclear energy and nuclear weapons and the difference between the two. Where would we be today without nuclear medicines. Radioactivity is a natural phenomena and people need to learn to live with it. As stated above France gets 70% of its electrical power from nuclear reactors, and the last time I looked, I did not see any French people glowing.
When I become King, they will all be shot, hanged, or fined! In the least, severely flogged. And of course, ordered to serve community service.
joe: just remember: community service BEFORE the hangings and shootings. Timing is important here.
Yes, community service cleaning up radioactive contamination sites.
Cleaning up radioactive sites nekkid. That way they can't steal any and cause any more mischief. Those wacky Germans...
HOOOOOOGAAAAAAANNN!!!!!!!
So if they sabotage the track and cause the train to derail what the F#@k is that going to prove.. They want to protect the environment by causing a { although unlikely } nuclear spill.. Sounds like another group that needs their heads examined.. They would be better served fighting for more green energy production via political actions.. Or brainstorming to invent new ways to generate electricity.. Saw an idea about using hot desert areas to heat water like they do on roofs of houses and create recirculating pressure to spin turbines..
Now for my conspiracy theory point of view.. There are inventions out there that have been suppressed by the energy/money masters that are able to make electricity in a green way.. Magnetic engines are one example..
So the fools think the containers are not safe, so they try to derail the train carrying them to cause a disaster REAL SMART They should crack a container open and spread radiation along it's path then the protester would be happy.
I believe in the right to protest, but what good is this kind of protest going to do. You risk endangering innocents if you derail the train, You risk exposing yourself. Nuclear waste is nasty stuff and really sould be left alone and put in a place that causes the least amount of damage.
If an activist wants to protest, fine. If they risk an innocent person's life or health in their "protests" however, then they should be dealt with like any other terrorist.
We are fortunate to have not had this problem in the US to any real extent.
Nuclear materials convoys are fairly common if you know where to spot them. The primary earmark is that you'll see a nondescript semi tractor/trailer traveling down the Interstate that has two or three dark Chevrolet Suburbans or similar vehicles preceding it, and two or three more behind it. Each of those vehicles has a heavily armed squad of security specialists inside of it. If Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, isn't an appealing option to a former combat infantryman or Special Operations soldier, this is another line of work they can get into.
Several years ago, the US Air Force retired many of its ICBM's and pulled them out of the ground in the Dakotas, Wyoming, and other states in that part of the country. They were craned onto rail cars and shipped, minus warheads, elsewhere to be scrapped. Several rolled past on the tracks behind my house. A heavily armed team of Security Forces Specialists accompanied them to their final destination. A curious neighbor of mine grabbed his camera and tried to get a close look while the train was stopped. Just when he was about to set up a nice photograph of them, an SF shouldered his M16A2 rifle and advised my neighbor that he didn't need to be there. No photo taken, but a neat story my neighbor now shares with the rest of us. He just didn't think they'd be quite so serious about it...
Okay TiGor. . . .let's say you're right.
You just told any terrorist who didn't ALREADY know how to spot a nuclear waste convoy. . .how to spot one.
As for the rest of us. . .what possible use is this information?
Yes, I work in the industry. (note the moniker) And a nuclear spill means job security for me. Plus no harm for the general population. I know that. . .I have a feeling you know that. But most of these folks don't. I have no problem with the whole job security thing. . . .but if you really were telling people how to spot a waste shipment. . . .why?
BTW, he's wrong.
They drive Audi's, now.
StrontiDog,
I think you knew what the score was when you put the word ALREADY in all caps. It doesn't exactly take much study for someone who really wants to find that out to learn that much.
The reality is that if you don't know what it is beforehand, by the time you notice enough to realize that's what you'd seen, it's already past. The convoys stay spread out enough that they're not real conspicuous. And, yes, it could be any type of vehicle, but typically it's going to be something roomy and good over the road that can accommodate a squad of well armed men for hours at a time.
Now, as far as what value this may have for most of us, it's just food for thought. This isn't exactly something that happens everywhere and every day. If you wanted to spot a convoy, you'd probably find yourself waiting for a long, long time before one came along. If you happen to encounter one while you're driving, and are observant enough to notice it, it may very well be a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. But there's a helluva a lot of nondescript semi trucks out on the roads, and a whole lot of SUV's on the road, too. I think it's no stretch of the imagination that a lot of traffic that looks like it might be a nuclear convoy is, in fact, just a semi pulling an unmarked dry van that coincidentally happened to have some large SUV's spread out ahead of and behind it.
Of course, merely seeing something is one thing. Interacting with it is something else. Anyone who thinks they can attempt to hijack a nuclear shipment is probably very ignorant of what they're going up against. The odds are definitely not in their favor, and I'm confident that anyone in their right mind is cognizant of that.
I saw the missiles roll past on rail cars. My neighbor wanted to go get up close and personal with them, and ended up with a weapon leveled at him and probably would have gotten himself either taken into Federal custody or shot if he hadn't the presence of mind to heed the Air Force security policeman who spotted him. And there was no nuclear material involved in that one, either.
More food for thought.
These protestors are idiots. Why would you want to throw flammables at or screw with the rails which could cause the train to derail causing an even larger catastrophe?
Wolvie, the answer to your question is simple: they ARE idiots. I doubt seriously any one of them have any kind of a REAL science background, other than that taught them by their sociology professors, which qualifies them for one thing, being IDIOTS.
there annual trip !!! what is wrong with people? hey do not protest us on nov,25th when we transfer our nuclear waste OK. I supose they won`t tell them about the nuclear wepons going through in december..lol
heh,there protesting a little ol` nuclear waste..why dont they protest the unexploded bombs left over from world war 2 in germany...
those things are like land mines,cept alot worse if one goes off
some radioactivity is health yfor ya..just take a look,smokes,microwaves (uses radiation to cook food) cellphones,cellphone towers,tv over the air,sattelite signals
and the life span of people have only increased on average since all of these sources of rads were added...
you know most old smoke detectors are radioactive?
Unexploded bombs? Hope you mean High Explosives and not nuclear bombs. . . .we can tell the Germans didn't have them in WWII because. . . .well. . . .we're still here, and stuff like that.
Microwaves use radio frequencies to cook food. It might fry your a@@, but it won't give you cancer. . . .wrong wavelength. Same with cell phones and towers and. . . .well, you have a point with TV's, but only the old fashioned CRT screens that produced a few X-rays in the 0.1 kilovolt range. . . .but you'd have had to sleep on top of it to get any ionizing dose. . . .
Nice try, but learn your stuff from something that doesn't start with a 'WIKI' before you try to impress anyone.
I catch a whiff of sarcasm in Shadowperson's post, but he does have part of a point with all of the UXO still buried in many parts of Germany and France. Not all of it is WWII era, either. There were plenty of dud artillery shells that wallowed in the mud a good 25 years before that.
But...
While protesting the transport of today's nuclear waste may be of little value, protesting unexploded ordnance from most of a century ago is of absolutely no value whatsoever. Just what is anyone supposed to do about it? Today, we can keep trying to find and recover it, but that's about all. The people who are responsible for it being deposited where farmers find it with plows every year have been gone for decades in most cases, and it's not like they could undo that mess once it was made, either.
Fortunately, the Germans didn't quite have nuclear bombs. They were sure working on it, though, and they weren't all that far from it. That's why we got so excited about it - to beat them to it. If the hydroelectric plant at Telemark, Norway hadn't been destroyed by saboteurs (the air raid had failed), the deuterium produced by electrolysis there could have had the Germans well on their way to completing a heavy water reactor with which they could have produced Plutonium. Thankfully enough damage was done to Germany's industrial capacity that the Allies prevailed several years before the Germans had a viable atom bomb. Just remember that if that had eventually come to pass, they would have also probably had a suitable ballistic missile with which to deliver it, too. They were much closer to that than they were a warhead.
They most likely want a catastrophe so that more people will listen and get involved. No one will do anything until something bad happens.
Lets protest nuclear waste by trying to derail a train full of nuclear waste!
Someone please shoot these people already.
all on board... the nuclear waste train...
anyone remember that ancient funk song called "party train"
i think "nuke train" would be an appropriate rework,lol
use peace train...and rework nuke..into it...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6mKMV0d2cs&feature=related
train full of nuclear waste, and you're trying to set it on fire, how STUPID are you people?
It's not 'safe' when you destroy the train tracks the waste is traveling on. What good does that do other than heighten the risk?
If you create nuclear waste then you should have your own dump site, not tote it across the country into other countries or other states!! Can't blame these people from being angry but trying to set the train on fire is a little nuts to me.
See my reply to your later post.
That makes a lot of sense dig a hole under the track to derail the train as part of a protest. Want a bunch of wacko's
Did you notice in the picture the police in the forefront are glowing, just lilke the nuclear waste. Scary.
Nothing scary about it. It's a thermal image. It detects heat. People are warmer than the surroundings. So is the reprocessed material.