I move:
That Dáil Éireann calls on the Government to immediately initiate the necessary legal proceedings to prevent commissioning of the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) at Sellafield in view of the fact that the Government has cited at least three EU Directives which the plant will contravene and given that British Nuclear Fuels Limited has indicated that it will be ready to begin reprocessing at THORP from 7 March 1994.
Is oth liom nach bhfuil aon dul as agam ach an rún seo a mholadh don Teach seo anocht agus iarraim ar Theachtaí uilig macnamh a dhéanamh air agus gníomhú i bhfábhar an rúin dá réir. Cé go bhfuil obair mhaith déanta go dtí seo, tá gá le cás dlí ón Rialtas mar gheall or THORP ar go leor cúiseanna agus de bharr cúrsaí ama, tá práinn nach beag ag baint leis an gcás céanna.
Before and since my election I visited THORP at different stages of its construction. The product of operations at the plant, plutonium, will have a half life of about 0.25 million years as will the increased discharges to the Irish Sea and elsewhere.
The arrogance of those managing the project is incredible. They dismiss concern about the day-to-day discharges of 2.2 million gallons of contaminated water into the sea from Sellafield. In a written question to the British nuclear authorities I asked about the substantial and deliberate increase in authorised plutonium, 239 discharges between 1956 and 1958, into the Irish Sea at Sellafield. The answer I got from the director of the Nuclear Electricity Information Group was: "I do not think that anyone would do such an experiment now, valuable though the results may be, because of public perception".
Year by year plutonium and other radioactive by-products are accumulating at Sellafield, requiring constant security, monitoring, protecting, expense and risk for future millennia. The arrogance which allowed this nuclear time bomb to continue, and even expand, can best be understood by comparing Sellafield to the Egyptian Pyramids. If the Pyramids were stores for nuclear waste they would still need high security protection and round-the-clock guards on the door. However, the weather has taken its toll on these monuments, civilisations come and go and, if the economy of Egypt today is taken into account, it is most unlikely that this level of expenditure, security and monitoring could be afforded in today's North Africa. Such expenditure for future generations will provide no economic benefit or return. What right has this or any other generation to place this burden and risk on its children?
Future generations can do nothing about what is happening now. Those of us living on both sides of the Irish Sea in Dublin or Workington, in Belfast or Barrow-in-Furness are in the front line. Over our graves children will ask why. Bram Longstappe, a former mayor of Barrow where most of the nuclear waste shipments are, has a poignant epitaph which is relevant to this motion:
Mourn not the dead in the cool earth
lie
Ashes to Ashes
Dust to Dust
Rather mourn the apathetic throng
The coward and the meek,
Who see the world's great wrong
And dare not speak.
In some cases it is enough to speak, but not in this case. All the pleas, appeals, diplomatic measures and resolutions have failed to stop THORP, although its start-up time has been delayed. We now face the eleventh hour in the sorry saga of Sellafield and Sellafield II, as THORP is also known. On 7 March 1994 British Nuclear Fuels plan to commission the THORP plant at Sellafield.
Much of the technology to be used in THORP has never been proven to be safe. Sellafield's previous experiment with oxide reprocessing, which will be carried out in THORP, ended in near disaster, a serious accident in the socalled Head End Plant in September 1973. There is no guarantee that a similar or worse accident will not occur if THORP is commissioned.
THORP will make West Cumbria into one of the world's main dumping grounds for nuclear waste. It is expected to account for about 34 per cent of the entire UK nuclear waste inventory from its operations between 1994 and 2030.
Existing facilities for the disposal of nuclear waste from Sellafield are likely to be full to capacity by the year 2005. The state-owned company, UK Nirex Limited, plans to build an undergrund waste repository beside Sellafield so that THORP's waste can be buried there. Serious doubts have been cast over the geological suitability of the area, with a senior nuclear scientist, Dr. Derek Ockenden, predicting recently that a nuclear chain reaction could be triggered off by the underground waste.
THORP will lead to further stockpiling of plutonium and the proliferation of nuclear weapons. President Bill Clinton is on record as being opposed to plutonium separation, one of THORP's main activities, as it will destabilise the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which is already under threat because of a resumption of nuclear testing by China.
The British Government has admitted that discharges from THORP could cause 16 cancer deaths every month in its first ten years of operation. I will spell out what the thermal oxide reprocessing plant proposes to do at Sellafield. Although Sellafield has been reprocessing nuclear material since it first developed weapons for Britain's nuclear bomb programme, the previously reprocessed magnox spent fuel is only one tenth as radioactive as the proposed oxide spent fuel which is the raw material required by THORP.
Sellafield's previous experience of oxide reprocessing was unsuccessful. In the late sixties the B204 military reprocessing plant was converted into the Head End Plant. This plant reprocessed 100 tonnes of thermal oxide fuel from Britain's advanced gas-cooled reactors. An unexpected chemical reaction in a process vessel in September 1973 caused a serious "blow back" accident that severely contaminated 35 workers, as well as the building, and no further reprocessing has been carried out in that plant since then.
Other countries' experiences with oxide reprocessing have been similarly troublesome. The world's only operational commercial-scale reprocessing plant UP2-HAO at La Hague, France, has had many setbacks and now operates at only 40 per cent of its capacity.
In August 1993 the UK Secretary of State for the Environment gave BNFL permission to undertake uranium testing at THORP. Shortly after the testing was due to commence a leak of nitrogen oxides occurred in the plant while testing equipment was being disconnected from the Head End areas and the main part of the plant; 280 people were evacuated as a precautionary measure. That an accident requiring plant evacuation should occur in the embryonic stages of THORP's operations does not augur well for its future. Oxide reprocessing involves complex processes during which the risk of a serious accident with far-reaching implications is always present.
The inherent problem with oxide reprocessing was spelt out by the 1986 House of Commons Environment Committee's Report: "The intense radiation of oxide spent fuel damages the solvents and attacks process plant; at the same time it makes direct maintenance extremely difficult, if not impossible". Successive British Governments have chosen to ignore these words of warning.
This brings me to the environmental consequences of THORP's discharges. British Nuclear Fuels Limited has said that it cannot guarantee that it can keep discharges within proposed limits. This is spelt out by British Nuclear Fuels in its application for an authorisation to dispose of low level waste from the marine pipeline at the Sellafield site submitted in 1992 which is as follows:
The realisation of lower future radioactive waste discharges to sea from the Sellafield site depends on the successful performance of several new plants, particularly those associated with effluent treatment. The design of some of these plants is unique and there is no previous experience to refer to in judging their likely performance.
A report from Time Out magazine carried in the Irish Independent on 24 May 1989 claimed that a major risk of radioactivity existed because storage ponds for THORP are not to be linked to a radioactivity extraction plant.
The level of discharges from THORP are supposed to adhere to a standard alara principle which is an acronym for as low as reasonably achievable. Many commentators have argued that the discharges from THORP will be much higher than those permitted from most other nuclear installations in the world. The discharge level of krypton 85 gas, for example, offers the most glaring illustrations of alara being flouted. BNFL plans to increase its current discharge level of krypton 85 gas tenfold. Two German scientists, Kollert and Reichelt, have estimated that a 50 per cent increase in global ionisation caused by the dispersal of krypton 85 would lead to a 10 per cent decrease in atmospheric resistance. The effects of the atmosphere's water vapours and the long term impact on the world's climate would be unpredictable.
The 1977 Windscale inquiry recommended that "BNFL should devote effort to the development of a plant for safe removal and retention of krypton 85 and if development proved successful, should incorporate it in the proposed plant". BNFL said it would be too costly to install krypton 85 filters in the THORP plant. Such short term expedience could prove disastrous in the long term. However, Her Majesty's Inspectorate and the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in the United Kingdom have also expressed doubt about the technology for filtering krypton 85 stating that "it has significant risk potential should there be a sudden release of the inventory of a cryogenic column or storage cylinder." That statement emphasises that technology for the removal and retention of krypton 85 cannot be deemed as entirely safe, another reason THORP should not be allowed to go ahead.
Very little research has been carried out on the impact of Sellafield or THORP on animals. Circumstantial evidence suggests however that the blackheaded gulls which formed a vibrant and ornithologically important colony on the Radenglass Estuary approximately two miles from Sellafield may have vacated their nesting spot due to their sensitivity to radiation. To assess the wider environmental impact of Sellafield and the likely impact of THORP, a monitoring programme of wildlife on both sides of the Irish Sea needs to be established.
It is particularly appropriate to raise the health effects of THORP in an Irish context. However, it must be remembered that the effects of Sellafield to date are not confined to these islands, but can be detected in many other countries and oceans. Aerial discharges monitored in Poland, Spain and Germany, for example, can be identified as originating at Sellafield.
There are many shades of opinion on the effects THORP could have on human health. An environmental impact assessment on THORP was not carried out nor has a through or authoritative projection on the health impacts been commissioned by the British Government. Proper research needs to be undertaken on leukaemia and childhood cancer levels here. It is lamentable that the Department of Health's last report on leukaemia was published in 1986. That report found that most of the significant incidence rates for children aged between nought and 14 years in the 1974 to 1983 period lived within relatively close proximity to the eastern coastline which, needless to say, faces Sellafield.
The 1984 Black Report could not find any conclusive evidence that Sellafield caused the high levels of leukaemia near the plant but said that no other cause could be found. The 1993 report by the UK Health and Safety Executive found that the incidence of leukaemia and nonHodgkins lymphoma in children whose fathers worked at Sellafield was about 14 times the national average. While not ruling out other factors the report said that a link between radiation and the high levels of these diseases is quite likely.
Perhaps I could draw the Minister's attention to a book published in the United States called "Deadly Deceit, Low Level Radiation, High Level Cover-Up", in which two United States statisticians conclude that radiation is partially responsible for the spread of AIDS and has caused millions of excess deaths in the United States.
Unfortunately, the International Commission on Radiological Protection has decided that the 1977 radiation dose limits should remain as guiding principles and hence no actual reduction in the tolerable dose limits has been declared. However, in his paper entitled "When is a dose not a dose?" published in 1992 Dr. Patrick Greene argued that the approach taken by the NRPB is scientifically fraudulent. He stated, "as far as the human body is concerned a dose of radiation is a dose of radiation. If the NRPB considers that a dose of more than 0.3 mSV is not tolerable, it should make no difference whether this dose is due to contamination caused by old discharges, a dose arising from current discharges or a mixture of the two".
This is no recent discovery; in fact in 1927 Herman Muller won a Nobel prize for showing that no level of radiation is safe. There is indeed no threshold below which genetic damage, cancer or a shortening of life is impossible. More recently environmental scientist, Peter Taylor, estimated that krypton 85 discharges could conceivably cause 200 fatal cancers and 10,000 skin cancers within ten years of THORP's commissioning. Taylor suggested that because those cancers would be spread over more than one country they could be hidden in general cancer statistics. We look forward to Ireland producing comprehensive cancer statistics in the future.
This demonstrates that Sellafield's pollution is not confined to any one country's borders and that THORP is an issue of international concern. It further underlines the need for use of best available technology to reduce and, as far as possible, eliminate krypton 85 emissions. There is not enough information available to assess the full impact on human health of other radio-nucleates from THORP. We do not have a publication from the National Radiological Protection Board on tritium discharges which will increase substantially if THORP is commissioned. Neither the National Radiological Protection Board nor the Ministry for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food in the UK takes into account organically bound tritium and food grown in tritium contaminated areas when calculating doses of the critical groups.
Evidence from the Canadian Pickering nuclear power plant has directly implicated tritium with causing congenital birth defects. Thorough research is needed before this radio-nucleate and its behavioural patterns are properly understood. It would be highly irresponsible to commission THORP before it can be proven that tritium emissions do not represent a serious health hazard.
I urge the Minister and the Government to think before tabling an amendment to this motion. I acknowledge the good work which has been done in this area, but we should focus our efforts on readily identifiable breaches of European Union law which all pertain to THORP. If the amendment seeks to tackle the issue of Sellafield and in some way includes THORP as part of the overall case, we will play into the hands of the nuclear lobby as they are able to pick holes in and discredit our arguments because we do not have 100 per cent proof in regard to some health issues. For that reason we should concentrate on THORP.
The health claims on both sides are a legal minefield and distract from the clearly illegal decisions in relation to THORP. We do not have time now to consider specific cases. Is it not a coincidence that THORP got the go ahead on the same day the Downing Street Joint Declaration was announced? Is it a coincidence that a decision on the Greenpeace and Lancashire County Council case is due to be announced in London on Friday and the plant is to be commissioned on Monday? The Government must not be drawn into a political manoeuvre on behalf of Britain which will leave the Irish Government with no room to act. Unless we deal with THORP as a single identifiable transgression of European law we will be sucked into the minefield of uncertainties and procrastination.
I have dealt only with the proposed normal operation of THORP. Before 1986, in the Soviet Union nobody would have seriously considered the effects of the accident at Chernobyl. Given the vulnerability of THORP as a concentration of radioactivity from around the world, adjacent to several ageing nuclear reactors, it is important to bear in mind some of the effects of the disaster at Chernobyl. In a 1988 Greek study it was calculated that in Western Europe alone 200,000 abortions were carried out following fears caused by the release of radioactivity from Chernobyl. The writer of the report, Professor Proukakis, claimed that a similar number of abortions had taken place in Poland. The position in other countries in Eastern Europe could not be investigated at that time.
A report in February 1989 revealed plants in the general area of Chernobyl were exhibiting giantism. In one case poplar leaves were growing to a diameter of seven inches. Farm animals 30 miles away on Ukrainian farms gave birth to deformed offspring.
A 1988 report predicted that 400,000 people in Ireland would die as a result of a similar accident at Sellafield and that half our agricultural sector would be wiped out. The cause of such an accident is difficult to predict, but the human error involved in Chernobyl is only one of a number of possible scenarios.
Recent news of earthquakes in America remind us that during the 1980s England and Wales were hit by 60 earth tremors, two of which, Irish people will remember, occurred in 1984 and in April 1990. In the latter case the epicentre was at Wrexham and measured 5.2 on the Richter Scale. Fortunately, the source of the quake was 15 kilometers below the earth's surface. The effects of a quake five or ten kilometers below the earth's surface would have been far more devastating.
Natural disasters aside, the Pan Am 747 crash in January 1989 was caused by an explosion which occurred very near Sellafield. While aviation rules exclude civilian aeroplanes from coming within a two mile radius of the plant, no such restriction applies to military aircraft. The Trawsfynydd nuclear power station in Wales is often used as a dummy target for military aircraft.
We should contemplate the seriousness of disasters before they actually occur. Surely a Government must take effective legal action on THORP if we are not to be reminded of the tragedy that has befallen other people around the world following accidents, nuclear bomb tests or other causes of radiation discharges. It may be difficult to contemplate, but it is important to bear in mind the report of one woman's experience who lived on one of the Pacific Islands. When she was seven years old the United States detonated a 15 megatonne hydrogen bomb called Bravo over her island. Since then she has produced seven limbless, headless offspring. After her seventh pregnancy she said:
I carried the baby for the full nine months. When I delivered the baby it had no legs, no arms and no head. It was breathing and it moved up and down but it was not a baby at all. It was a bag of jelly. I have had seven like that.
In the area of plutonium transportation, glib assurances that Britain has transported more than 30,000 tonnes of fuel over seven million miles without any serious leak of radioactivity do not allay public concerns, especially in the wake of ecologically devastating accidents involving release of non-radioactive substances at sea, such as the Braer and Exxon Valdez oil disasters.
The activity of THORP has been in breach of Article 79 of the Euratom Treaty, in so far as nuclear regulatory authorities are required "to keep and provide records to the European Commission in the case of the transport of source materials and special fissile materials which include plutonium". British Nuclear Fuels has been notoriously reluctant to supply details of plutonium transports. British fire brigades are not notified of radioactive flask movements in advance and lack the relevant expertise in radiological protection to know how best to act in an emergency involving nuclear materials.
Who is to say that all the plutonium floating in the Irish Sea is legitimate? In June 1988 British and American researchers claimed that more than two tonnes of plutonium from Britain's civil nuclear stockpile is currently unaccounted for. On 28 March 1990, four people were arrested in London for smuggling nuclear trigger devices, in transit from the USA, to Iraq.
What I have said could be used to build a strong case against THORP. Even though the Attorney General, Mr. Harry Whelehan, claimed Ireland does not have a sustainable case against THORP, he has not made public the details of his deliberations on THORP. I welcome the Minister for Transport, Energy and Communications, Deputy Cowen to the House and I am pleased he is present to hear my contribution. Ironically, the Minister outlined why Ireland should take legal action against THORP. He is on record as saying that the commissioning of THORP will be in breach of EU law. In his submission on the second round of consultations on THORP, held by the British Department of the Environment last autumn, he cited three EU Directives which the commissioning of THORP would contravene. EU Directive 80/836, as amended by Directive 84/467, states that no practice involving radiation exposure should be adopted unless it produces sufficient benefit to exposed individuals and to society. One might ask what benefit radiation exposure in Ireland will provide?
EU Directive 85/337/EEC requires that an environmental impact assessment be carried out before such a nuclear installation is undertaken. The original planning inquiry in 1977 is now almost 17 years out of date. The Windscale Inquiry of 1977 omitted a number of key issues that would have to be taken into consideration by an EIA, such as the impact of radiation on flora and fauna together, with the practice of releasing Krypton 85 the discharge levels of which may increase ten fold. EU Directive 90/313/EEC requires that relevant environmental information be made freely available. Supporters of THORP argue that the plant will be profitable on the basis of a report prepared by the accountancy firm Touche Ross. However, the British Secretary of State for the Environment, Mr. John Gummer, in December 1993 revealed that he had never seen a copy of this crucial report before he authorised THORP.
The decision to take legal action ought not to be as daunting as the Government appears to believe. A case taken by Luxembourg and the German State of Saarland against a Cattenom nuclear power station on the Moselle was heard by the European Court of Justice in 1986. That case was won when Cattenom was found to be in breach of Article 37 of the Euratom Treaty. It will interest the Fianna Fáil partners in Government, and perhaps the Labour Party, that the former Taoiseach, Mr. Haughey, said in relation to Sellafield in this House on 12 March 1986: "I do not know if many Deputies experience as I do a very real feeling of anger when I consider the enormity of this situation and what we in this country are being asked to tolerate".
The Green Party, as well as many people on both sides of the Irish Sea, again calls on the Government to act legally before it is too late. It is often remarked that the Government seems to have put this issue on the backburner, but there is no backburner left. I have repeatedly said that the Government has been working very hard diplomatically, but its words, though eloquent and plentiful, have fallen on stoney ground. This call for legal action at the eleventh hour is one of many such calls. In November 1988 a Dublin Corporation conference was urged by Mr. Peter Taylor of the Political Ecology Research Group in England to "take THORP to court as the designs in its construction are not the most modern". At another international conference in Liverpool in 1990, organised by Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment which was attended by Members of this House, including Government Members, a resolution was unanimously passed urging the Irish Government to reconsider its decision not to take legal action against the UK for radiological contamination of the Irish Sea. That conference was known as "THORP — The New Threat from Sellafield".
The amendment the Government is considering refers to Sellafield and THORP as if they were one issue. I repeat that the issue of THORP is as clear cut as one could imagine in terms of nuclear affairs. The breach of EU Directives is a matter for legal procedure whereas it is almost impossible to be 100 per cent certain on arguments about the issue of Sellafield, which are very difficult to prove conclusively in a court of law. I urge the Government, as protectors of the people, to take legal action specifically on THORP. There may be cause for a court case on Sellafield, and the sooner the better, but THORP is the issue of immediate concern. I make this request not for myself, not even for my party, but for people North and South of the Border, Unionist and Nationalist, British and Irish. Even the police officer who arrested me in Workington Dock for blocking a shipment of plutonium nitrate, which was due to travel though rush hour traffic to Sellafield for reprocessing, would thank the Government for taking legal action on this issue. That police officer told me he had to do his job but that he wholeheartedly supported what I was doing.
Lest there be any question of the Government considering the sensitivities of the British authorities due to the peace process, which is extremely welcome and urgent, I ask it not to be dissuaded from being decisive on this matter in the courts. Many people in Britain, including the UK Government, believe that the original decision to go ahead with THORP was wrong — even the man who made the decision admits it was wrong. If the British, with their stiff upper lip, do not take account of their previous mistakes — a considerable amount of money has been spent to date and will have to be spent on monitoring the plant even after it is finished in the year 2030 — and does not reconsider, we have the independence of a sovereign State, a member of the EU, and we should use the existing procedures to deal with this matter, whether by arbitration, which would be much weaker than a legal case, or a court case, which we would stand an extremely good chance of winning. Let us be decisive on the matter.
If this question involves reconsideration by the Attorney General, let him do so. If it involves seeking wider legal opinion which may open up some, as yet, unnoticed loopholes, let that be done. If EU Directives which have been signed and agreed by members are ignored we do not take a case, what is the point in having a law?