Nuke train held up at German border

A train carrying nuclear waste from France to Germany has been held up at the border as protesters sat on the tracks.

The protest at Berg, a town on the German side of the border with French Alsace, remained peaceful, with protesters holding their ground as riot police looked on.

The train is en route to the northern German town of Dannenberg, where the nuclear waste will be unloaded from train to trucks for the last leg of its trip to a storage facility at Gorleben.

German police are bracing for a massive demonstration against the shipment in Dannenberg itself, northern Germany, where organisers expect between 30-thousand and 50-thousand people to protest on Saturday.

Protests were staged in France on Friday, including the town of Valognes, where the train left to make the 930-mile journey to Germany.

The shipment of waste, stored in Germany as part of a long-standing agreement, comes amid an intensified debate over the use of nuclear power to meet rising demand for energy and concerns about its risks to human health and the environment.

Greenpeace officials, including executive director Kumi Naidoo, say the shipment is "the most radioactive in history" and potentially more dangerous than the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in area of the Soviet Union that is now Ukraine.

State-controlled French nuclear engineering company Areva, which processed the nuclear material in its plant in La Hague, sharply denies those claims.