Police said four Greenpeace activists who chained themselves to the tracks near Sennfeld and four others hanging from ropes from a pedestrian bridge were delaying the transport of the first waste Germany was sending to France for reprocessing in four years.

 Police said they were using special welding equipment to free the demonstrators.

 "It will probably take a while for us to clear the tracks," a spokesman said. Six demonstrators have been taken into custody, police said.

 Protesters were trying to stop a container carrying nuclear waste from a power plant in Bavaria that began its journey to a waste reprocessing center in France. The container was first transported by truck and accompanied by a police escort from the Grafenrheinfeld power plant to a rail station in Gochsheim.

 Several hundred anti-nuclear activists stood by at the train station where the container was transferred to the rails amid a police presence of hundreds of German police. But they were unable to stop the demonstrators in the nearby town of Sennfeld.

 Three further containers carrying spent nuclear fuel from the Philipsburg power plant in Baden-Wuerttemberg and another container from the Biblis plant in Hesse were due to join the rail transport in Woerth in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate before it heads for the French reprocessing plant in La Hague.

 Authorities said the Philipsburg and Biblis plants had nearly exhausted their temporary storage capacity and would be forced to shut down soon if the waste was not removed.

 Anti-nuclear demonstrators had clashed with police two weeks ago when Germany took back the first cargo of reprocessed waste from France since the German government banned the shipments in 1998 over concerns about radioactive leaks and huge anti-nuclear protests.

 Authorities employed 20,000 police costing the state around $50 million to protect the shipment on its way from France back to a storage facility in the northern German town of Gorleben. Protesters briefly halted the train by chaining themselves to the tracks.

 German anti-nuclear activists have announced they will try to block the train coming from Philippsburg in southwestern Germany before it crosses into France on Tuesday evening.

 The train carrying nuclear waste from Germany to a reprocessing plant in northern France this week will pass through the suburbs of Paris, French anti-nuclear groups said.

 The train, due to traverse France in the early hours of Wednesday, will pass through Bobigny, a suburb so close to the capital that it is on the Paris metro network, they said.

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