Pat Dollard

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Demonstrators threw Molotov cocktails at police, setting a vehicle on fire, as skirmishes intensified Friday after a shipment of nuclear waste reprocessed in France crossed into Germany on its way to a controversial storage site.

The clash broke out in the afternoon between about 400 riot police and 300 demonstrators in the woods outside the northern German town of Dannenberg, near the storage facility at Gorleben where the nuclear waste is being transported by train.

Protesters threw Molotov cocktails and other pyrotechnics at officers, setting a police transport van ablaze, said federal police spokesman Martin Ackert. As a fire truck tried to rush to the scene, demonstrators blocked it, then punctured its tires before fleeing into the forest, he said.

Nobody was injured in the incident, and there were no arrests, Ackert said.

Nearby, 30 people occupied the train tracks in effort to hinder the shipment, while in another clash police turned their water canons on demonstrators to break up a protest, Ackert said.

Nuclear energy has been unpopular in Germany since fallout from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine drifted over the country and the annual shipment has been a traditional focal point for protesters.

This is the first shipment, however, since Chancellor Angela Merkel decided to shut all Germany’s nuclear plants by 2022, following safety questions raised after the disaster at Fukushima in Japan. While other countries are also following suit or considering doing so, neighboring France is still committed to nuclear power, with President Nicolas Sarkozy insisting Friday that it would be “madness” to reduce his country’s high reliance on it.