Nuclear waste

Greenpeace research unveils nuclear legacy

Paris, 19 June 2000 Greenpeace today released new images of the legacy of radioactive waste dumping at sea from ships. The shocking footage was taken in the Hurd Deep, in UK territorial waters just off the Channel Islands and some 15km north-west of Cap de La Hague (France).

It shows corroding, broken and disintegrated barrels of radioactive waste, remnants of some 28,500 barrels tipped into the sea by the UK between 1950 and 1963. Hurd Deep is one of many such dumpsites used until a global ban was agreed in 1993.

Two Greenpeace vessels, the MV Greenpeace and the Twister, spent the last two weeks scanning the seabed at depths up to 100 meters. Once they located radioactive waste barrels, a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) fitted with cameras was dispatched to the seabed to make a closer inspection. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency's 1999 Global Inventory of Radioactive Wastes in the Marine Environment, the total radioactive inventory of the Hurd Deep is a staggering 57,942 GigaBequerels.

"Although dumping radioactive wastes at sea from ships is now banned, paradoxically the discharge of radioactive wastes into the sea via pipelines from land is not," said Mike Townsley of Greenpeace. "Such 'double standards' are not maintained for technical or scientific reasons, but only because the operators of the nuclear reprocessing facilities in La Hague (France) and Sellafield (UK) want to save money."

"It is cheaper for them to continue to use the sea as a radioactive garbage bin than to store this radioactive waste on land; for the nuclear industry, money comes first and the environment second", said Mike Townsley (2).

Each year, Europe's giant nuclear reprocessing facilities at Sellafield in the UK and La Hague in France, discharge hundreds of millions of litters of radioactive waste into the sea. The amount of radioactivity discharged from La Hague and Sellafield in only 9 months exceeds that dumped in the Hurd Deep.

"Hurd Deep and the other former ocean dump sites stand testament to the irreversibility of dumping radioactive wastes in the ocean -- regardless of whether from a ship or a land-based pipe", said Mike Townsley.

Carried by the ocean currents, radioactivity from La Hague and Sellafield has already been detected in sea life around the coasts of Scandinavia, Iceland and the Arctic, and will continue to build up in the food chain, threatening the health of millions of people, unless the discharges stop immediately.

Next week at the annual meeting of the OSPAR Commission, the intergovernmental organisation that regulates marine pollution in the North East Atlantic (from Gibraltar to the Arctic), Denmark, Ireland and other countries are proposing to ban nuclear reprocessing in the region. Greenpeace supports the move to harmonise international regulations by banning all dumping of radioactive waste into the sea, whether it be from ships or from a land-based pipeline. (3)

Notes to editors:
(1). In 1993, the Contracting Parties to the London Convention, the UN treaty which regulates the dumping of wastes at sea, banned the dumping of all radioactive wastes from ships, aircraft, platforms and other man-made structures at sea. However the agreement does not cover the dumping of radioactive wastes in the sea from a land-based pipeline.

(2) The plants in La Hague and Sellafield are responsible for approximately 90% of all radioactive waste discharged into the European environment

(3)The member states of the OSPAR Commissions are: Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK, as well as the European Union. A three quarter majority (12 votes) is required for the proposal to be adopted. Hosted by the Danish government, the meeting will take place 26-30 June in Copenhagen.

Greenpeace warned today (25 th October 1999) that the Government's response to the House of Lords' Select Committee Report on Nuclear Waste Management leaves the door open to huge volumes of foreign nuclear waste remaining in the UK.

"Britain is going to be lumbered with huge volumes of radioactive waste if substitution is allowed to go ahead," said Greenpeace nuclear campaigner, Pete Roche.

"This Government is prepared to go to extraordinary lengths to prop up a failed, dangerous, uneconomic and environmentally damaging reprocessing industry. That it is prepared to contemplate turning Britain into the world's nuclear waste dump in order to keep it going is an outrage," he added.

BNFL imports foreign spent nuclear fuel to its Sellafield site in Cumbria for reprocessing, mainly from Germany and Japan. For every flask of spent nuclear waste fuel imported to the UK, about eight flasks of nuclear waste are created. If the Government accepts BNFL's substitution proposal, roughly seven of these eight flasks would remain in the UK.

Under current Government policy, all the nuclear waste created during reprocessing from contracts signed since 1976 must be returned to the country of origin. If the "waste substitution" option were to go ahead, BNFL would return slightly increased volumes of high level waste whilst all the bulky low and intermediate level waste would remain in this country. Intermediate level waste remains radioactive for at least a quarter of a million years.

The last Government told BNFL that it would allow this "waste substitution" option provided that BNFL found, within the next 25 years, an acceptable deep disposal site for the nuclear waste that would stay in the UK. However, it is clear that BNFL cannot achieve this. In 1997, permission was refused to NIREX to build a dump beneath Sellafield as it was considered too dangerous.

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Greenpeace press office on: 020 7865 8255