Wackersdorf reprocessing plant
The Wackersdorf nuclear reprocessing plant was a planned reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf in Bavaria, Germany. Because of protests, the plant was never completed. Today it is an industrial site with no special features.
Anti-WAA protest
In the early 1980s, plans to build a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the Bavarian town of Wackersdorf led to major protests. In 1986, peaceful protests as well as heavy confrontations between West German police armed with stun grenades, rubber bullets, water cannons, CS gas and CN-gas and demonstrators of which some were armed with slingshots, crowbars and Molotov cocktails took place at multiple occasions at the site of a nuclear reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf. The plans for the plant were abandoned in 1988. It is still unclear whether protests, plant economics, or the death of the Minister-President of the state of Bavaria, Franz Josef Strauß, in 1988 led to the decision.The Anti-WAAhnsinns Festivals were political rock concerts which took place in Germany in the 1980s. Their purpose was to support protests against a planned nuclear reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf. In 1986, the fifth festival marked the peak of the protest movement against the plant.
Protest monuments
To this day, there are still some monuments to the WAA resistance against the plant:- Franziskus-Marterl with the "Cross of Wackersdorf" near the WAA. At the chapel-shrine in the mid-1980s, WAA opponents met every Sunday at 14:00 for an ecumenical prayer and then moved into the area or to the hoarding. This is the same place where today the "Marterlgemeinde" meet four times a year to a prayer: at the Chernobyl- and Hiroshima-commemoration in memory of the shrine's saint Francis of Assisi on 3 October and on Christmas Eve.
- Anti-WAAhnsinns Festival memorial stone at Lanzenanger in Burglengenfeld
- Anti-WAA ex-voto in the Kreuzberg Church at Kreuzberg in Schwandorf
- WAA resistance memorial in front of the lake facilities, Bregenz Festspielhaus
- Anti-WAA Memorial in Salzburg
Documentary films
Some German documentaries about WAA were filmed.- WAA Wackersdorf: Strahlende Zukunft für die Oberpfalz
- 18 Tage freies Wackerland
- Schreckgespenst WAA – Widerstand in Wackersdorf
- WAA-Schlachten
- Wackersdorf - ein Mythos? Was ist aus den WAA-Kämpfern von einst geworden?
- Lieber heute aktiv als morgen radioaktiv
- Zaunkämpfe
- Kirche unterstützt Mahnwache am Wackersdorfdenkmal
- Der Fahrradspeichenfabrikkomplex
Literature
- Astrid Mignon Kirchhof, Helmuth Trischler: in: ibid Pathways into and out of Nuclear Power in Western Europe Austria, Denmark, Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, and Sweden. Deutsches Museum Studies 4, 2020 pp.148-149, ISBN 978-3-940396-92-1
- : speech 2014, beyondnuclearinternational 2019