Amid sorrow and anger over the death of the 21-year-old man who had attached himself to the railway near the eastern French city of Nancy, a number of defiant activists blocked the tracks near Uelzen, northern Germany.

"The train has stopped in Uelzen because there are people on the rails," a police spokesman said. An estimated 11,000 police officers are guarding the convoy.

The train, which resumed its journey from Uelzen after about an hour, is carrying 12 containers of spent fuel rods.

The shipment left the retreatment plant at La Hague in northern France on Saturday evening and crossed on to German soil late Sunday.

By midday Monday, the shipment had reached the northern German state of Lower Saxony bound for a storage dump near the northern town of Gorleben. It is expected to reach its destination later Tuesday.

Germany, which has no treatment facilities of its own, sends spent fuel rods from its nuclear power plants for reprocessing at the La Hague plant before they are returned here for storage.

The consignment is the seventh to be sent back to Germany since 1996.

Anti-nuclear and environmental campaigners say the shipments are dangerous and that the waste will contaminate the water table at Gorleben.

They have vowed to disrupt the arrival of the consignment, leading police to mount a massive security operation.

Following the death of the protester in France, German Environment Minister Juergen Trittin of the ecologist Greens party called on both sides "to avert dangers of this kind" during the final stretch of the convoy's 600-kilometer (370-mile) odyssey.

But a spokesman for environmentalist group Robin Wood said the blockades would continue.

"We think it is necessary and legitimate to continue our protests despite the incident in France," said Juergen Sattari.

A representative from a regional organization opposed to the shipments, Dieter Metk, said that the death of the protester had only mobilized resistance.

"Many people think that we should not give up in this situation," Metk said, saying it was "shocking" that the shipment had continued late Sunday after the fatal accident.

Demonstrators have turned out to this scenic region of northern Germany for what have become traditional cat-and-mouse games with police during shipments of nuclear waste to the Gorleben dump.

More than 5,000 anti-nuclear protestors -- a diverse band of local farmers, teenagers with dreadlocks and veteran environmentalists -- began the protests Saturday in northern Germany to rally against the imminent arrival of the shipment.

After demonstrating in Dannenberg market square on Saturday, protestors gathered at the railway station and also temporarily blocked the tracks to be used by the train.

From Dannenberg, the consignment will be loaded onto trucks and taken by road on the last 20 kilometers of the journey to Gorleben.

In large part due to the expense and complexity of the waste transports, as well as a campaign pledge by the Greens party, Germany has agreed to phase out its nuclear power plants by 2020.