BERLIN, Nov 11: A radioactive waste shipment arrived at a German dump on Tuesday after the biggest anti-nuclear protests in years, pointing up the fierce opposition to reversing Berlin’s phase-out of atomic energy.

The protests, the biggest since 2001 with thousands of police deployed over the weekend, caused the 123 tonnes of nuclear waste to arrive around 20 hours late at the Gorleben disposal site in northern Germany.

The waste originated in German nuclear power stations before being sent to a reprocessing plant in La Hague in northwest France.

It was then shipped backed to Germany on Friday bound for Gorleben, and undertook most of its 1,200-kilometre journey by train.

After passing through northern France on Friday, the train was held up at the border for half a day by three German activists jamming their arms into a concrete block under the track.

Once in Germany, around 16,000 police were deployed as some 15,000 demonstrators rallied along the route, hindering progress with tactics such as setting up barricades on the tracks and then setting

fire to them.

Germany’s rail operator said that activists had almost simultaneously set nine separate fires, causing millions of euros worth of damage as well as delays for “hundreds of thousands” of passengers.

Eventually the train arrived in the early hours of Monday morning at an unloading station, more than 14 and a half hours late.

The cargo was then transferred to lorries for the final 20 kilometres trip to Gorleben.

But along the last leg some 1,000 activists forming a human blockade around the site had to be removed one-by-one by truncheon-wielding riot police before the lorries could proceed.

Tractors had also blocked the way and activists chained themselves to tall hand-built cement barriers — reportedly demanding to talk to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in person before they would make way for the nuclear waste.

The protests came as Merkel’s conservatives seek to revisit Germany’s decision taken under her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder to mothball the last of its 17 reactors — which produce a quarter of Germany’s power — by about 2020.—AFP