The Government is to seek an explanation this morning from the UK authorities about an incident in which a 12,000-tonne pontoon collided with a British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) ship on Saturday.
The ship, the Pacific Crane, is used to transport nuclear waste and was berthed in Barrow-on-Furness, on the west coast of England, when the incident occurred.
A spokesman for BNFL confirmed last night that the pontoon, twice the size of the Pacific Crane, collided with the vessel during storms last Saturday. There was no nuclear material on board at the time, according to the BNFL spokesman.
The collision caused three "tears" in the ship's side.
The Departments of Public Enterprise and the Marine will be in touch with the British authorities "first thing in the morning", a spokesman said last night.
The port of Barrow-on-Furness is about 70 miles from the Isle of Man.
The Green Party MEP for Leinster, Ms Nuala Ahern, said yesterday that ships like the Pacific Crane were used to transport radioactive material through the Irish Sea to Japan, "and now that all foreign intermediate nuclear waste must go back to its foreign owners, this will increase the number of waste movements".
If the Pacific Crane could be holed because of a freak accident while it was tied up, what would be the consequences of an accident at sea, particularly one involving an oil tanker, Ms Ahern asked. "The nuclear materials could melt in a firestorm, bringing contamination worse than Hiroshima to the Irish Sea," she claimed.
The BNFL spokesman described Ms Ahern's comments as "utter, convoluted rubbish". He said that ships such as the Pacific Crane were designed with a double hull to withstand collisions far worse than the one in Barrow-on-Furness.
In the unlikely event of a ship's sinking, he added, the nuclear material was stored in "flasks" which were leak-proof.
The Government wrote last week to two British ministers demanding that they honour commitments made earlier this year and block the operation of a new nuclear plant on the Sellafield complex.
The Minister of State for Public Enterprise, Mr Joe Jacob, wrote to the two ministers last Friday after the UK Environment Agency sanctioned the operation of a £300 million plant to manufacture a new nuclear power plant fuel, including uranium and plutonium.
The agency, however, relegated a final decision on the MOX plant to the British government.