Date: Mon, 6 May 1996 08:31:56 -0400
 
     3 May 1996 (Reuter) - France is expected to send a first
convoy of highly radioactive nuclear waste to Germany early
next week from a reprocessing centre in northern France,
Greenpeace said. A Greenpeace official reckoned the waste
would leave La Hague reprocessing around May 6, and that it
would reach the storage centre at Gorleben on May 8, a focus
of growing anti-nuclear protests.


     4 May 1996 (Reuter) - At least 4,000 people demonstrated
near a nuclear depot in north Germany on Saturday against an
atomic waste shipment arriving by train from France this week,
and some vandalised railway tracks, police said. The rally
passed off peacefully but police later surrounded and detained
100 protesters after they damaged railway lines nearby.
Several hundred campaigners also blocked a local trunk road
for 30 minutes with a sit-down protest.


     5 May 1996 (Reuter) - German police said on Sunday they
planned to charge 23 people with breaching the peace and
railway sabotage during Saturday's protests against a shipment
of nuclear waste from France. 


     5 May 1996 (Reuter) - Russia needs to spend large sums of
money urgently to prevent new accidents and pollution at Mayak
(Chelyabinsk region, southern Urals) the country's only
nuclear fuel reprocessing plant, senior government officials
said. "Accidents at the plant in the past and permanent
dumping of liquid nuclear waste in the neighbouring
environment have led to a more dangerous situation than in
Russian territories which were affected by the Chernobyl
disaster." Officials said more than 60,000 people were
evacuated after the Mayak accidents, while about 900 were
suffering from severe doses of radiation. However, many
scientists and environmentalists say the full effects of the
accidents remain uncertain because victims were evacuated to
remote parts of the Soviet Union and no records have been kept
of most of them since then.