The demand of the Lower Saxony interior minister, Uwe Schünemann, to call off the transports because of the heavy load of overtime police will be required to work during the world soccer championship, has been met with sarcasm by the federal environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel. As far as he knew, Gabriel told a local newspaper, Castor transports always took place in the uncomfortable November, the championships in summer. When he was still state premier of Lower Saxony, Gabriel had used the same police overwork argument to stop Castor transports in 2000 because Hanover city hosted the World Exposition, although it ended in October.

The BI says there will again be imaginative and determined resistance to the transports. "The Castor transports to the surface hall in Gorleben are senseless, dangerous and because of the usual policing a threat to the constitution," said the BI spokesman. Because of the enormous heat its highly radioactive content develops, every container has been approved to remain for 40 years in the Gorleben hall to allow the temperature to decrease.

After that the radiating and still strongly heating atomic waste is to be taken into an underground repository. "The Gorleben salt deposit has been known to be unsuitable since the early 80s. Its porous rock cover allows contact with ground water so that radioactive isotopes cannaot be prevented from entering the biosphere," warns the BI spokesman. "Gorleben must not be allowed to be turned into the nation's nuclear toilet with police violence, because the flushing mechanism works upwards in this case."

A group of experts assembled by the previous federal government to search for a final repository, AKEnd, recommended in a concluding study in 2002 that because of its extremely high half-life times, highly radioactive atomic waste must be safely shielded from the life environment for at least a million years. In the BI's view, the building stop still applying to the exploratory Gorleben salt mine must finally be turned into a permanent closure. "The federal government should at last stop spreading the illusion of a possible safe atomic waste disposal and as its only 'argument' put up democracy-hostile police massings against a population defending itself," the BI spokesman concludes.

Francis Althoff 05843 986789