Gorleben as a battleground

Accompanied by protests, the eleventh transport of nuclear waste from the French nuclear reprocessing plant in La Hague has arrived at the intermediate storage facility in Gorleben. The daily Süddeutsche Zeitung predicts that nuclear energy will be a major issue in the parliamentary elections of 2009: "It looks good when a democracy strictly observes the right to demonstrate and takes a relaxed stance on non-violent forms of civil disobedience. ... The basic conflict is and remains unsolvable ... . Atomic energy is a form of energy that requires ... complex security systems and people are sometimes unable to deal with this complexity. But it is also rational to recall that so far the only accident with serious consequences was Chernobyl. ... But whichever way you look at it Gorleben remains the symbolic site where opposition to nuclear energy coalesces. ... Neither the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) nor the Social Democratic Party (SPD) have the desire or the courage to initiate an open-ended search for a final disposal site."

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