At the end of November 2011, the last Castor transport with nuclear waste rolled to Gorleben. One action kept the police busy for hours and is still considered a great success by the demonstrators.
At the time - in this "hot autumn", as the protesters had announced at the time - the train with contaminated nuclear waste from Le Havre in northern France had already been on its way for four days to the highly controversial interim storage facility in Wendland in Lower Saxony. While tens of thousands of Castor opponents have already formed in the region, lining the routes, chaining themselves to rails, blocking roads, and the police using water cannons, Hanna Schwarz is afraid. "Suddenly everything goes through your head," she recalls today of the time just before she put her arm in the 500-kilogram concrete pyramid and had it fixed. "Have I eaten at all? Have I eaten enough?"
Farmers place concrete block
Ten years ago, nuclear power opponent Hanna Schwarz stopped the Castor for a few hours with her action.The pyramid is painted yellow, the color of the anti-nuclear protest, which is still the color of crosses on federal highways and in front gardens. The concrete block is supposed to stop the castor ten years ago this Sunday - and it actually does. At least for a long 15 hours. Only a few kilometers before Hitzacker, Hanna Schwarz, Fritz Pothmer, Georg Jansen and Heiko Müller from the rural emergency community make it onto the rails and place the pyramid.
Pyramid stays on track for 15 hours
Sparks fly, the pyramid remains:the police are unable to remove the concrete block.It was designed in such a way that any movement could injure the arms inside. Not an easy task for the police, who are trying to allocate the pyramid with heavy equipment, free the young woman and end the blockade. When the officials remove the stones from under the pyramid, it sags and the young woman is at risk of being injured. All this costs time and nerves.
Demonstrators free themselves
In the end, the demonstrators offer to free themselves - also because their own strength is dwindling. The train can resume its journey at 3:30 a.m. Immediately afterwards, the four activists talk about the failure of the police and want to make it clear to everyone that the officers could not remove the pyramid from the tracks. "As things stand at present, the police are unable to free the people unharmed in a reasonable time," the officials concede. A complete success for the demonstrators.
Police don't see it as defeat
But the police don't see that as a defeat, explains Matthias Oltersdorf today. At that time he was in charge of the Castor mission in Lüneburg, but he is now retired. It was crucial for him that the transport reached Gorleben and that nobody was injured during the operation. "As a police leader, I am a little grateful that this protest is a protest conducted with responsibility."
The eleven containers reach Gorleben on November 28th
After 126 hours, the transport struggles to reach its destination. At the entrance to Gorleben, they are greeted again by around 1,300 demonstrators. The interim storage facility is largely cordoned off by the police. Further actions by the protesters on the access routes do not stop the special vehicles on which the eleven containers with the highly radioactive waste have been loaded since Dannenberg. Ten years ago this weekend was the last protest of this magnitude in Wendland for the four "Heroes of Hitzacker", as they are called by many, and for thousands of nuclear opponents.