Madam, - On May 23rd the British government issued a consultation document on the future of the nuclear industry in Britain. Last week the four Fianna Fáil MEPS made a formal submission in response.
Energy choices are a sovereign issue decided by individual EU member-states. That said, we have very serious and justified concerns about ongoing safety issues at the Sellafield nuclear plant. While there are 14 primary nuclear facilities in Britain, Sellafield has had a history of very serious systems failures for years. For this reason alone, we believe there should be an orderly and safe closure of the plant.
We support the two legal cases taken by the European Commission in recent years against the British government over safety breaches at Sellafield. The commission is right to demand answers as to how Britain is going to clean up the notorious B30 dump which has contained an unquantifed level of radioactive materials since 1959. The commission also wants to know how 83,000 litres of radioactive liquids leaked from the Thorp re-processing facility. This plant has remained closed since April 2005 because of this incident.
In reality, the commercial reprocessing of spent nuclear fuels from third countries has been an abject failure. British Nuclear Fuels has had a licence to re-open Thorp since last January but it cannot do so because of ongoing safety considerations.
We believe the European Commission should be highlighting in the media its decisions concerning Sellafield. We also believe it is time for the European Union to set up an independent nuclear inspectorate with the power to investigate safety standards within all nuclear facilities in Europe.- Yours, etc,
LIAM AYLWARD MEP, (Vice-President, Climate change committee, European Parliament), Hugginstown, Co Kilkenny.