Recent damning reports of safety lapses at Sellafield could provide Dublin for the first time with the legal basis for action against the British government or British Nuclear Fuels, the Minister of State at the Department of Public Enterprise, Mr Joe Jacob, said yesterday.
"The closure of Sellafield is now seriously on this Government's agenda," he declared after meeting his opposite number in London.
After almost an hour of talks with Mrs Helen Liddell at the Department of Trade and Industry, Mr Jacob said the reports reflected "a malaise" at Sellafield and the findings had been "startling in the extreme".
In a report published two weeks ago, the British Inspectorate blamed systematic management failure for allowing individual workers to falsify records at the plant.
Mr Jacob said yesterday: "The report showed there had been bad management, bad working practice, safety lapses, all going on since the early 1990s under their noses. That to me is startling in the extreme."
Speaking on the day BNFL appointed Mr Norman Askew to succeed Mr John Taylor, who resigned as chief executive on Monday, the Minister said the Attorney General, Mr Michael McDowell, was now considering the implications of the inspectorate's report. Mr Jacob said he hoped, as a result of the Mr McDowell's advice, to be able to bring the matter quickly before the European Court.
For years, he said, the Government had been advised that it had no basis for legal action against Sellafield. However, with the latest damning indictment of safety procedures and lapses, the Minister believed that situation had changed.
Confirming that he had pressed the case for closure with Mrs Liddell, Mr Jacob said: "The fears we have are diverse. First, there is the storage of high-level waste in its present form. We've called repeatedly for the expeditious vitrification of that particular material; there are the discharges into our marine environment; the escalation of activity, such as the MOX plant; and on top of that there is the possibility of an incident at Sellafield."
The Minister continued: "It does not have to be anything of the enormity of Chernobyl to have a mind-boggling impact on Ireland and the east coast."
Kevin Rafter adds:
A Government spokesman confirmed last night that with the evidence in the latest reports on Sellafield the question of taking a case was going to be re-examined. The Attorney General had been asked to examine the matter. The advice offered by previous attorneys general had been that there was insufficient scientific evidence available to mount a successful legal action.