A shipment of 600 tonnes of depleted uranium has left a nuclear fuel plant in Germany bound for Russia, a Russian environmentalist group says. Twelve rail cars left the Urenco plant in the town of Gronau, close to the Dutch border, on Monday 22 June, according to the Ecodefense group. The waste will reportedly be moved by sea and rail to a plant in the Urals. Urenco told the BBC its uranium would be further enriched in Russia and the process met environmental standards. Russia's state atomic energy corporation, Rosatom, insisted it was "inaccurate and misleading" to refer to the depleted uranium as waste. But environmental activists have long been concerned that Russia may become a "dumping ground" for radioactive material from power plants. Greenpeace protested last year after German media reports that Urenco had resumed shipping depleted uranium from Germany to Russia after a gap of 10 years. Russia had halted the practice in 2009 under pressure from environmentalists.
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