At the OSPAR ministerial meeting in June, Ireland and the othercontracting states must hold British ministers to account for failing toensure reduced radioactive discharges into the north-east Atlantic,writes Peter Roches.
In 1998, when Mr Joe Jacob, then Minister of State at the Department of Public Enterprise, attended the last ministerial meeting of the OSPAR Convention (for the protection of the marine environment of the north-east Atlantic) in Sintra, Portugal, radioactive pollution of the north-east Atlantic was high on the agenda.
The UK's notorious Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant was seen as the main culprit. The outcome of the meeting was hailed a success, and the UK's Deputy Prime Minister, Mr John Prescott, famously declared: "I was ashamed of Britain's record in the past but now we have shed the tag of the Dirty Man of Europe and have joined the family of nations."
Far from shedding it, the UK is now in danger of adding to the tag the accolade "Dishonest Man of Europe" because of its attempts to claim progress when it has done nothing in five years to deal with the problem.
At Sintra, the UK committed itself to "progressive and substantial reductions of discharges, emissions and losses of radioactive substances". It was supposed to work towards further substantial reductions by the year 2000, and ultimately "close to zero" concentrations in the marine environment by 2020. Progress was to be reviewed after five years.
Five years have passed, and Ministers will meet again in Bremen, Germany, on June 25th and 26th this year to review progress. However, there is no progress to review. In five years OSPAR has:
Failed to agree a "baseline" from which to measure whether reductions in radioactive discharges have actually taken place;
Failed to come up with a definition of exactly what "close to zero" means; failed to review the national plans on discharges presented by each member-state, which are supposed to be the core of the programme to meet the objectives;
Simply deleted the commitment to work towards substantial reductions or eliminations of discharges by 2000.
And all the time, discharges from Sellafield have been going up and are set to increase further over the next few years - 1998, 95.67 TBq; 1999, 123.12 TBq; 2000, 84.28 TBq; 2001, 136.61 TBq; 2002, 146.26 TBq.
Under the UK Strategy for Radioactive Discharges 2001-2020, discharges are likely to increase considerably over the next few years.
The UK and France (the only member-states with nuclear waste reprocessing plants), have actively been obstructing OSPAR's progress on radioactive discharges to ensure business as usual for nuclear reprocessing.
It has been clear from the outset from the UK's national plan that the large increases planned in throughput for Sellafield's reprocessing plants will cause radioactive discharges to go up.
Discharge of the controversial radioactive pollutant, technetium-99, will remain higher than in 1998 until it falls in 2006. Even then, overall discharge levels could remain higher than 1998 levels until 2014.
The UK Strategy also allows Sellafield's newest reprocessing plant, THORP, to remain open until 2024, which means the UK cannot possibly achieve "close to zero" concentrations in the environment by 2020.
All this is explicit in the national plan the UK presented to OSPAR, and yet so far OSPAR has not properly addressed, or even acknowledged, this fundamental flaw.
After five years of work, it is already possible to see that further measures are essential if OSPAR is to achieve its objectives on radioactive discharges. Ongoing and projected discharges from reprocessing alone make this an inescapable conclusion.
The UK government's discharge strategy patently fails to meet the commitments made by John Prescott in 1998.
Without further measures, including the implementation of the non-reprocessing option for the management of spent nuclear fuel (as agreed by all contracting parties except the UK and France in OSPAR Decision 2000/1), the upcoming OSPAR ministerial meeting in Bremen in June will be a failure.
If it is to deal with radioactive discharges in a credible way, OSPAR has to act immediately and decisively to stop reprocessing, even if this means isolating British and French Ministers in Bremen.
For the sake of their addiction to reprocessing, the UK and France appear willing to risk the credibility of international environmental agreements and their relations with their European neighbours by reneging on commitments made five years ago.
Ireland and the other OSPAR contracting states must not allow this to happen. They must hold the UK to account.
Failure to do so will make these governments complicit in increasing discharges from Sellafield. They must tell British Ministers, in no uncertain terms, that unless they change direction before June, the UK will not just be tagged the "Dirty Man of Europe" at Bremen, it will be the "Dishonest Man of Europe" too.
Peter Roches is an anti-nuclear campaigner with Greenpeace UK