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ENVIRONMENT

Gabriel warns anti-nuclear waste activists against violence

Germany’s Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned anti-nuclear activists against violence when demonstrating against nuclear waste transports taking place this week.

Gabriel warns anti-nuclear waste activists against violence
File photo an anti-nuclear activist near Hamburg. Photo: DPA

“I didn’t have any sympathy for violent protests against castor transports when I was Lower Saxony’s state premier and I don’t have any sympathy for it now as the environment minister,” Gabriel told the Oldenburger Nordwest-Zeitung on Monday.

Castor stands for “cask for storage and transport of radioactive material,” and their transport is regularly accompanied by demonstrations throughout Germany.

Social Democrat Gabriel asked Green Party politicians, who are planning on participating in the demonstrations, “not to give the impression that property damage, as we have experienced in the past, is a legitimate form of protest.”

He also criticized the Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU) for their position against on an open search for a repository. That kind of attitude is “almost a scandal” and would only heat up protests in the temporary disposal zone in the city of Gorleben, Gabriel told the paper.

Gabriel accused CDU General Secretary Ronald Pofalla of treating the controversial Asse II nuclear storage site in Lower Saxony as something like a “bio-waste container,” because Pofalla had called nuclear energy “green energy.”