Minister to discuss Irish Sea radioactivity

The Government will today meet a Greenpeace campaigner to discuss the environmental group's latest measurements of Irish Sea radioactivity.

The meeting was arranged before yesterday's release by Greenpeace of an analysis of sediments taken near a radioactive discharge pipe used by the Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Cumbria. Levels of radioactivity in the sediments were high enough to allow them to be classified as nuclear waste if they were found on land, according to Greenpeace.

"Obviously we are hugely concerned," said the Minister of State for Public Enterprise with responsibility for nuclear safety, Mr Joe Jacob. The Government and he had "used every opportunity and every forum" to highlight the State's opposition to the operation of the Sellafield plant.

He had discussed it two weeks ago with Britain's energy secretary, Mr John Battle, and arranged today's meeting with Greenpeace in preparation for the July meeting of the Oslo/Paris Convention meeting in Lisbon, where nuclear pollution would be discussed.

Greenpeace sampled sediments taken two kilometres off the Cumbrian coast, near the end of the Sellafield waste pipe. Divers recovered the sediments on May 23th, according to Greenpeace scientist Dr Helen Wallace.

She said Sellafield discharged 8,000,000 gallons of liquid waste per day into the Irish Sea, which contained up to 40 radioactive substances. The group looked at three: americium, cesium and cobalt. They measured the activity in becquerels per kilo of dried sediment (bq/k).

Caesium 137 levels were 37,000 bq/k, americium levels were 13,000 bq/k, and cobalt levels were 490 bq/k, according to Dr Wallace. These levels exceeded EU and UK levels for materials to be considered radioactive waste. On land such materials were disposed of at a special Cumbria site.

It was no surprise that nuclear materials would be found at the end of a pipe discharging nuclear waste, according to Mr Alan Hughes, spokesman for BNFL. The company carried out regular monitoring around the plant and Britain's Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Food and the Environment Agency did their own monitoring.

A Fine Gael statement called for an "immediate inquiry" into the Greenpeace claims. Ms Nuala Ahern MEP, of the Green Party, said the Irish Sea was becoming a radioactive dump. She was "once again shocked by the secrecy surrounding nuclear waste".

The Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland said it was not surprised at the high levels of radioactivity. However, its monitoring had shown that radioactivity levels in sediment were many times lower on this side of the Irish Sea.