Some time today or possibly tomorrow a metal canister containing radioactive plutonium dust will be cracked open and dumped into holding tanks in a new building on the sprawling Sellafield reprocessing complex. This act will mark the formal start-up of the MOX plant, which opens despite concerted efforts to stop it by the Government and environmental groups.
The Government here talks tough and threatens further legal action but also knows that successive governments have failed consistently for 15 years to find a legal opening against Sellafield.
This has allowed Sellafield and the British nuclear industry to continue polluting the environment with long-lived radioactivity, in the process making the Irish Sea one of the most radioactive bodies of water in the world. MOX will add to that radioactive burden.
The MOX, or mixed-oxide plant, is the latest facility to be opened at Sellafield in Cumbria. It will take waste plutonium and uranium recovered from spent nuclear reactor fuel and combine them to produce a new type of fuel for nuclear power plants.
Although the plant will not itself become a major new source of radioactive pollution affecting the Irish Sea, its presence will increase the amount of spent fuel being handled by Sellafield's THORP plant. This in turn will ramp up the radioactive discharges being pumped into international waters off our east coast.
The Government waged a fierce battle against the introduction of MOX, invoking a range of international treaties. Only two days ago it made a fresh submission to the Hamburg-based International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea, as part of its attempt to halt the plant coming into operation.
It had failed in an attempt late last month to prove that the Republic's rights under the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea had been breached. The tribunal ruled on December 3rd, however, that both countries must lodge documents with it this week, including information about MOX pollution.
Two environmental groups, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, joined forces last month in a London High Court attempt to nobble the MOX plant, but also failed despite subsequent appeals and a judicial review.
The Government is now considering the use of two other international treaties, OSPAR and EURATOM, to fight Sellafield, said a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Enterprise. No fresh cases are pending, however, and if taken they will come too late to prevent the plant from becoming radioactive, after exposure to plutonium, and remaining a biological hazard for at least 30,000 years.
The Taoiseach and his Ministers have also battled on the diplomatic front, raising the issue repeatedly at summits and at ministerial level. Mr Ahern discussed the plant with British Prime Minister Mr Tony Blair at the British-Irish Council meeting in Dublin Castle at the end of last month.
The Minister for the Environment, Mr Dempsey, raised it with the EU Environment Commissioner, Ms Margot Wallstr÷m late last month. The Minister of State for Public Enterprise, Mr Joe Jacob, this week met the Norwegian Minister for the Environment, Mr Borge Brenda. He carried Mr Jacob's and his own government's anti-Sellafield message to London in a meeting with the British Environment Minister, Mr Michael Meacher, and Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Mrs Margaret Beckett.
These submissions were listened to politely and then promptly rebuffed.
Sellafield's operator, BNFL, is awaiting delivery of a "licensed instrument" from the UK Nuclear Installations Inspectorate which will allow MOX to go into production. "It is our current plan that we will be introducing plutonium into the facility on or around the 20th as planned," a spokesman for the company said yesterday. "We are currently on schedule to do that on or around Thursday."
The plant comes on stream only days after it emerged that six British reactors, including four on the Sellafield complex, were shut down on safety grounds. The action was taken following a safety alert last October at the Chapelcross reactor in Scotland.
Essential safety systems which close down a reactor in an emergency did not work as expected, and it was decided to shut down similar reactors until the problem could be studied further. This does not inspire confidence in a company which has added yet another massive piece of nuclear machinery to the collection that sits just across the Irish Sea.