Over the summer, we bent a rail with a hydraulic bottle jack on the old railroad line between Nançois-Tronville and Gondrecourt-le-Château. We chose to operate precisely between Tréveray and Saint-Amand-sur-Ornain, not far from the field where the Burelesques festival of resistance to Cigéo will be held from August 16 to 18.
In a few years’ time, the SNCF plans to put these rails back into service to transport the nuclear waste that the French government would like to bury at Bure. Public consultations were held in 2022 on this rail project, and SNCF subcontractors have since begun measuring the route. This would involve 36 km of rehabilitated former railroad line, running right through the middle of villages (perhaps foreshadowing a future stage of expropriations in a few years’ time?). ANDRA also envisions the convoy of six 100-meter-long radioactive trains at 40 km/h per month for 100 years.
Further south in the Meuse, between the current “research laboratory” at Bure-Saudron and Gondrecourt-le-Château, ANDRA is advancing its plans for another section of track. At the beginning of 2024, the French Radioactive Waste Management Agency (Agence Nationale de Gestion des Déchets RadioActifs – ANDRA) launched a procedure to expropriate the land it would like to transform into a rail line (a section it calls the “Installation Terminale Embranchée”), initially to transport materials for the construction phase of Europe’s largest industrial project, and then eventually (while construction continues) to transport the waste to the Cigéo downhill facility, where it will be buried for eternity 500 meters underground.
The action we carried out also responds to the “Train to nowhere” call for a week of actions – from August 11 to 17, 2024 – in solidarity against the North Bothnia Line, “a railway just beginning to be built along the coast of Swedish-occupied Sápmi. This project is a continuation of several hundred years of brutal colonization of the peoples and lands in Sápmi. Extractive industries are thriving on the increased demand for raw materials following the so-called “green transition”. This makes them continually stress the importance and urgency of the train line. So do the Swedish State and the European Union.”
It’s not just since the attacks on TGV lines at the opening of the Olympic Games that sabotage actions on the rail network, as a means of political struggle, have enjoyed a pleasing upswing in recent years. That’s why we’d like to make it clear that the method we use is absolutely unsuitable for stopping trains, and can lead to serious accidents! When used on an active line, it is imperative to ensure that train traffic is stopped beforehand by appropriate means.
The line we sabotaged is not currently in service. Our aim was both to make it more difficult to restore the line as planned, and to mark the sabotaged section of line as an integral part of Cigéo, and therefore a legitimate target of our resistance. We would like to take this opportunity to join the call for a campaign launched by “les trois brigantes” (March 2023), to target the SNCF as an active player in the nuclear industry, and to attack it en masse at the latest when the physical rehabilitation work begins.
Wherever ANDRA wants to turn this land into a landfill and a radioactivity convoy, let’s oppose it with festivities, sabotage, public gatherings, demonstrations, occupations and blockades. Let’s not let them pass.
No nuclear trains, here or anywhere else.
No nuclear, here or anywhere else.
Translated by Act for freedom now!
