again crucial: The authorities had rushed through the licensing process, and police occupied the site hours before the first construction license was granted, in order to prevent a repetition of Wyhl. Demonstrators trying to enter the site a few days later got harsh treatment, and all this helped consolidate the population in opposition. In February 1977 the Minister-President of Lower Saxony, Ernst Albrecht of the Christian Democratic Union, announced that the salt mines in Gorleben would be utilised to store radioactive waste. New protests by the local population and opponents of nuclear power broke out and approximately 20,000 people attended the first large demonstration in Gorleben on 12 March 1977. Protests about Gorleben continued for several years and, in 1979, the prime minister declared that plans for a nuclear waste plant in Gorleben were “impossible to enforce for political reasons". In 1980 an Enquete Commission of the Bundestag proposed "a paradigmatic change in energy policy away from nuclear power". This contributed to a broad shift in German public opinion, the formation of the Green Party, and its election to the German Bundestag in 1983. In the early 1980s plans to build a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant in the Bavarian town of Wackersdorf lead to major protests. In 1986, West German police were confronted by demonstrators armed with slingshots, crowbars and Molotov cocktails at the site of a nuclear reprocessing plant in Wackersdorf. The plans for the plant were abandoned in 1988. It still isn't clear whether protests or plant economics led to the decision. In 1981, Germany's largest anti-nuclear demonstration took place to protest against the construction of the Brokdorf Nuclear Power Plant on the North Sea coast west of Hamburg. Some 100,000 people came face to face with 10,000 police officers. Twenty-one policemen were injured by demonstrators armed with gasoline bombs, sticks, stones and high-powered slingshots. The plant began operations in October 1986 and is scheduled to close in 2018. Chernobyl disaster The Chernobyl disaster in 1986 was a pivotal event for Germany's anti-nuclear movement. After the radioactive fallout cloud covered large parts of the country, Germans went to great lengths to deal with the contamination. Contaminated crops were destroyed, firemen dressed in protective gear cleaned cars as they crossed the border from other countries, and sand in playground sandboxes was replaced. Following Chernobyl, the Green Party strived "for the immediate shut-down of all nuclear facilities". The SPD pushed