Some 300kg of uranium from a long-closed reactor in the former East Germany was airlifted to Russia yesterday for processing.
A convoy of around 40 police vehicles escorted the silver armored truck carrying 18 containers of uranium during the 10km, pre-dawn trip from the former Rossendorf nuclear research center to Dresden airport.
Police spokesman Thomas Herbst said the operation involved between 300 and 500 police and more undercover officers. Security officials had dispatched a second decoy convoy.
The containers were loaded aboard a waiting Russian plane, which took off early yesterday, Herbst said.
The uranium -- 200kg of it highly enriched, and the remaining 100kg enriched to a lower degree -- was headed for a processing center at Podolsk, outside Moscow.
Nuclear waste shipments in Germany have frequently met with protests, but the journey to the Dresden airport passed without major incident.
The convoy ran into a group of 20 to 30 anti-nuclear protesters along the way, forcing the vehicles to stop briefly before changing routes and proceeding to the airport, officials said.
Experts from the UN's Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the US National Nuclear Security Administration were on site assisting the Russians handling the transport.
The transfer of the uranium is part of a joint US-Russian program in cooperation with the IAEA called the Global Threat Reduction Initiative (GTRI).
Its aim is to find, secure and recover dangerous nuclear materials around the world to prevent them from falling into the hands of terrorists.
In a recent fact sheet, the US Department of Energy said the GTRI program had secured more than 400 sites around the world containing enough radioactive material for 6,000 "dirty bombs," conventional explosives laced with nuclear material.
Once back in Russia, the highly enriched uranium will be mixed with low-grade uranium so that it becomes low-enriched reactor fuel that will no longer represent a proliferation risk.
Over recent years, smaller quantities of uranium have been returned to Russia from several countries including Romania, Serbia and Bulgaria.
The Rossendorf reactor was shut down in 1991, the year after German reunification.
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