A RADIOACTIVE waste leak at Britain's Sellafield nuclear plant could result in an Irish catastrophe, a conference in Manchester heard yesterday.
A report prepared for the Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLAs) claims failure of tanks holding a liquid called HAW could result in between 5,000 to 15,000 extra cancer related deaths and probably mass evacuation of half a million people in certain regions.
Hearing the details of the report at a special Safety at Sellafield seminar in Manchester, the Dun Laoghaire Rathdown county councillor Ms Bernadette Connolly called for immediate preventive action.
"From Ireland's viewpoint, the significance of Sellafield can be summed up as causing and continuing to cause long lasting radioactive contamination of the Irish Sea, the existence of which is objectionable," she said. "And it poses a risk that, due to a very severe accident at the site, this country could be contaminated to such an extent as to have serious consequences for health and for the economy.
She said that "the management of stored nuclear spent fuel will continue to pose a threat to the citizens of Ireland and as responsible bodies for the welfare of people at local level, we cannot bury our heads in the sand."
Seventy delegates from 34 local authorities across Britain and Ireland met at the seminar on Safety of Highly Radioactive Wastes at Sellafield to hear the findings of the NFLAs' research, which purports to identify key weaknesses in the way Sellafield is regulated, allowing the owners, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), to ignore legitimate public concerns.
The organisation first highlighted the catastrophic effect that failure of the storage tanks might have in 1994, when it said it could result in a disaster between 10 and 100 times worse than Chernobyl.
The NFLAs have called for an open review of the potential hazards, saying that although the nuclear installations' inspectorate (N11), the industry watchdog, does not dispute what might happen, it refuses to order BNFL to take action.
The NFLAs want BNFL to suspend spent fuel reprocessing at the Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP) to allow the accumulation of HAW to be converted into stable glass blocks. The N11 admit this could be done in under four years.