The legal tug-of-war over dozens of Castor transports of highly radioactive nuclear waste right through North Rhine-Westphalia continues: The Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz (BUND) has filed a complaint against a ruling of the Berlin Administrative Court, which had deemed an emergency request by the environmental association against the nuclear-waste tourism, long criticized as “senseless and dangerous,” to be inadmissible.
Now the Berlin-Brandenburg Higher Administrative Court is supposed to ensure that the transports of 288,161 fuel elements from the high-temperature reactor of the former Nuclear Research Centre in Jülich near Aachen to the interim storage facility in Ahaus, about 170 kilometers away, do not begin during the ongoing fast-track proceeding.
Because the Administrative Court as the first instance had merely rejected the BUND’s request on formal grounds: the environmental association was simply “not entitled to file” against the Berlin-based Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Disposal (BASE), which is under the SPD Federal Environment Minister Carsten Schneider, according to the Berlin judges — in the concrete case the BUND did not have associational standing to sue.
In substance, however, the 10th Chamber of the Administrative Court had decided that, due to the safety concerns raised by the BUND, the success of a substantive main action was “open at the present time.”
Court faced redacted documents
Finally, the nearly 300,000 highly radioactive fuel elements in 152 Castors are apparently to roll for months across the crumbling highways of the most populous federal state, North Rhine-Westphalia, with 18 million inhabitants — roughly via the state capital Düsseldorf and the densely populated western Ruhr region around Duisburg.
Moreover, the transport permit from BASE was legally assessable only to a limited extent, according to the Administrative Court: central parts of the permit documents had been redacted and were therefore unreadable for the Berlin judges.
Therefore, criticism rains down from BUND: “If courts acknowledge that safety issues cannot be comprehensively assessed, but at the same time prevent them from being reviewed at all, effective legal protection collapses,” says Kerstin Ciesla, deputy state chair of the environmental association in NRW. “Here, safety was not decided, but rather who is allowed to ask questions.”
The judgment thus contradicts European law, which grants recognized environmental associations the right to judicial review of violations of environmental-related legal provisions, argues the BUND. “We will not let our rights be taken away — that is why we are filing the complaint,” explains Deputy State Chair Ciesla. For if even “high-risk nuclear transports are denied judicial control,” environmental legal protection as a whole would be at stake.
Demonstrations planned for Sunday
Anti-nuclear initiatives such as the Münsterland Alliance against Nuclear Installations, the Stop Westcastor Jülich coalition, and the Federal Association of Citizens’ Initiatives for Environmental Protection (BBU) welcomed the BUND complaint.
For this coming Sunday, anti-nuclear activists are therefore calling for a rally in front of the town hall in Ahaus, starting at 2 p.m. And on Saturday, January 24, demonstrations are planned from 11 a.m. at the Bottrop-Süd highway rest area.
Residents along the motorways have thus far not been informed by the federal or state governments or the police about the “significant accident and safety hazards of truck nuclear-waste transports,” says anti-nuclear activist Jens Dütting of the Ahaus initiative. Because of a major highway construction project between Bottrop and Oberhausen, the A2 there is an “obvious safety bottleneck.”
“Action must finally be taken” by the black-green state government, demands Matthias Eickhoff of the Münsterland Alliance against Nuclear Installations. The BUND complaint offers a “political window of opportunity” for the Green NRW State Minister for Economics, Mona Neubaur, who is also responsible for nuclear oversight, but also for North Rhine-Westphalia’s CDU Prime Minister Hendrik Wüst himself, to still prevent Castor transports through negotiations with the federal government.
Green state association grows more critical
By now, even the NRW state association of the Greens is cautiously distancing itself from its own state government, according to anti-nuclear opponents like Eickhoff. For the Sunday demonstration in front of the town hall in Ahaus, the Greens also called to participate — and thus to protest against the policies of their own deputy prime minister Neubaur.
“Nuclear-waste transports are dangerous and a safety risk for our country,” said Tim Achtermeyer, co-state chair of the Greens. Earlier there had been sharp criticism, for example from the Left: “By the time the first Castor rolls, Neubaur’s resignation is overdue,” stated their nuclear-policy spokesperson in NRW, Hubertus Zdebel, to .
