A shipment of nuclear waste from France finally reached a storage facility in north-west Germany today, after police worked overnight to clear a roadblock of more than 3,000 protesters.
The German nuclear waste which had been reprocessed in France left by train from Valognes on Friday and reached its destination 92 hours later as trucks drove it the final 12 miles of its 930-mile journey to Gorleben.
It was the longest journey time recorded for the once regular transport, following a 79-hour trip in 2008.
The protests by anti-nuclear activists were galvanised after Angela Merkel's government extend the life of Germany's 17 atomic power plants by an average of 12 years.
"Whomever extends the time for atomic power plants, must also count on an extended time for atomic waste transports," said Wolfgang Ehmke, a spokesman for protest organisers.
Protesters tried to hinder the shipment along the entire route, rappelling off bridges over the train tracks, undermining roads to make them impassable, and forming human shields across the route.
A shepherd even herded her flock of 500 sheep and some 60 goats across the road between Dannenberg, where the waste was loaded on to the trucks, and Gorleben in an effort to slow down the transport.
In one of the largest mass scuffles, riot police on Sunday tried to stop up to 4,000 protesters going through the woods on to tracks near Dannenberg ahead of the nuclear waste train. Police used water cannons and pepper spray and wrestled with activists to break up the protest, but some still reached the railway line.
Nuclear energy has been unpopular since fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine drifted over Germany.
On Saturday, at least 25,000 people (organisers gave the figure as more than 50,000) demonstrated peacefully outside Dannenberg in the biggest protest ever against the shipments.
Activists say neither the waste containers nor the Gorleben site, a temporary storage facility, are safe.
Protests against the regular shipments faded somewhat after a previous government embarked a decade ago on plans to phase out nuclear power entirely by 2021, but this year the chancellor's government decided to extend the life of the nuclear plants. Parliament approved the plan last month.
Germany has no plans to build any new nuclear plants, but Merkel has argued atomic power is needed as a "bridging technology" to keep energy cheap and available as the country becomes more reliant on renewable sources.
Germany receives waste shipments roughly every year under an agreement that involves spent fuel sent to France for reprocessing and returned for storage. Safety measures for the shipment involve sealing the solid nuclear waste in glass that is in turn encased in 40cm-thick (16in) steel containers.
Decisions such as keeping nuclear plants running "may be unpopular at the moment, but they will pay off", Merkel was quoted as telling Focus weekly. "They are necessary for us also in future to be a successful economic centre."
