The protests, the biggest since 2001 with thousands of police deployed over the weekend, caused the 123 tonnes of nuclear waste to arrive around 20 hours late at the Gorleben disposal site in northern Germany.

The waste originated in German nuclear power stations before being sent to a reprocessing plant in La Hague in northwest France.

It was then shipped backed to Germany Friday bound for Gorleben, and undertook most of its 1,200-kilometre (750-mile) journey by train.

After passing through northern France on Friday, the train was held up at the border for half a day by three German activists jamming their arms into a concrete block under the track.

Once in Germany, around 16,000 police were deployed as some 15,000 demonstrators rallied along the route, hindering progress with tactics such as setting up barricades on the tracks and then setting fire to them.

Germany's rail operator said that activists had almost simultaneously set nine separate fires, causing millions of euros (dollars) worth of damage as well as delays for "hundreds of thousands" of passengers.

Eventually the train arrived in the early hours of Monday morning at an unloading station, more than 14 and a half hours late.

The cargo was then transferred to lorries for the final 20 kilometres (12 miles) trip to Gorleben.

But along the last leg some 1,000 activists forming a human blockade around the site had to be removed one-by-one by truncheon-wielding riot police before the lorries could proceed.

Tractors had also blocked the way and activists chained themselves to tall hand-built cement barriers -- reportedly demanding to talk to German Chancellor Angela Merkel in person before they would make way for the nuclear waste.

The protests came as Merkel's conservatives seek to revisit Germany's decision taken under her predecessor Gerhard Schroeder to mothball the last of its 17 reactors -- which produce a quarter of Germany's power -- by about 2020.

The conservatives, who argue that abandoning nuclear power undermines the goal of cutting greenhouse gases, want to look at extending the life of some nuclear power stations.

They also say that going back to nuclear, as fellow EU member Italy is doing, would reduce help Germany's dependency on oil and gas imports from Russia and the Middle East. It would cut consumers' energy bills and give a boost to German firms such as Siemens that are active in nuclear technology.

They are opposed by many centre-left Social Democrats, who are junior members in Merkel's governing coalition.

Despite soaring power bills, polls show that a majority of Germans also remain opposed to nuclear power and believe the technology remains highly dangerous because of potential accidents and terrorist attacks.

They also say that the question of where to permanently store nuclear waste, which can take centuries to become non-toxic, remains unresolved -- both in Germany and across Europe.

Gorleben is only meant to be a "temporary" storage site where the waste can stay for up to 40 years, Till Doerges from protest organisers x-tausendmal quer told AFP. But it then has to be permanently put somewhere else, he added.

Earlier this year it emerged that water had leaked into another storage site, at Asse in northern Germany, leading to radioactive contamination in the local area in what was a "catastrophe," Doerges said.

"For years the public has been lied to. For years we had radioactive contamination around Asse and no one was told ... Nuclear power cannot be the answer to the climate problem," he said.

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