On 7th June ten Greenpeace activists in the Netherlands chained themselves to railway lines to block a shipment of nuclear waste. The train, carrying highly radioactive nuclear waste from the country’s Borssele nuclear power plant, is currently en route to France.
The highly radioactive waste in the three railcars contain a similar quantity of radioactive material to that released from the nuclear disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The next two years will see ten such shipments to France.
The containers go by train from Belgium to the French nuclear plant at La Hague. There the waste is reprocessed. It’s a risky and polluting process in which radioactive waste is released into the environment.
Unbelievably, only 4% of the waste is converted into new nuclear fuel. The rest of it is returned to the Netherlands and remains dangerous for 240,000 years. However, the country does not have storage facilities to keep the waste safe for that incredible length of time. No-one does.
– from greenpeace.org