DANNENBERG, Germany - Tens of thousands of people demonstrated Saturday against a shipment of nuclear waste traveling to a storage site in northern Germany, a protest fueled by a government move to extend the country's use of atomic energy.
Demonstrators turned fields outside the town of Dannenberg into a sea of yellow-and-red flags with the slogan "Nuclear Power - No, Thanks." Police estimated the crowd at some 25,000.
The waste crossed into Germany Saturday on its journey from a reprocessing plant in northwestern France. In Dannenberg it will be unloaded from the train to trucks for the last leg of its trip to the storage facility at nearby Gorleben.
Police discovered tunnels dug by protesters under roads the trucks are due to travel in at least two places, in what seemed to be attempts to render the roads impassable.
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Activists maintain that neither the waste containers nor the Gorleben site, a temporary storage facility, are safe. The waste is stored in a warehouse near a disused salt mine that has been earmarked as a possible permanent storage site.
"What we need to say to (Chancellor) Angela Merkel is that this is a Chernobyl on wheels," Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo told the protesters.
"People's resistance in Gorleben sends a valuable message to the government of this and other countries," he said. "We will not bow down to a government acting in the interests of the nuclear industry and against the interests of their own citizens."
