THE European Union must act as a guarantor for nuclear safety, and must take firm measures against installations with a suspect safety record, including Sellafield, the European Parliament heard yesterday.
Speaking during a debate to mark the 10th anniversary of Chernobyl, the Fianna Fail MEP Mr Jim Fitzsimons (Leinster), called for renewed efforts at EU level to ensure the safety of nuclear installations. Rigid procedures must be adopted by Europe to allow for closure of those risky plants like, Sellafield, he said.
International responsibility for monitoring the health effects of nuclear power must be transferred from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to the World Health Organisation (WHO), the Green MEP, Ms Nuala Ahern (Leinster), said in the urgency debate, while the Fine Gael MEP, Ms Mary Banotti (Dublin), called for a concentrated and co ordinated response to Chernobyl, so that remaining nuclear reactors there could be closed.
It was vital that the EU play a central and constructive role in supporting nuclear safety in the former Soviet Union, Mr Fitzsimons said. Closure of Chernobyl could not come soon enough, he added.
The impending privatisation of Britain's nuclear industry raised further safety concerns for Irish people, who had been living under "a cloud of unease" as the Sellafield plant stumbled from "one misdemeanour to another", he said.
Some countries, especially those with a nuclear industry, were afraid of the consequences of a complete disclosure of the full damage done and continuing risks of Chernobyl, Ms Banotti said. "The downside of the nuclear industry might be impossible to live with in the long term," she added.
Ms Ahern, who also chaired a Green Group round table on Chernobyl in Strasbourg yesterday, said the International Atomic Energy Agency was clearly not competent to judge the health effects of nuclear power. Its nuclear safety division had been at the forefront of a "cover up" of the consequences of Chernobyl, in publishing a health report in 1990 which dismissed evidence of diseases linked to fall out, she claimed.
Research under the WHO published in March 1995 in the British Medical Journal had indicated that the incidence of thyroid cancer in children in the Gomel region of Belarus and the most affected areas of Ukraine was close to 100 times the norm and rising.
Speaking in advance of the debate, the Labour MEP, Mrs Bernie Malone (Dublin), called on the Government to make further aid for Chernobyl a priority during Ireland's EU presidency.
At a press briefing earlier this week in Strasbourg, the socialist group defended the European Commission's current approach to Chernobyl. Ukraine could "not blame the EU" for the failure to close the plant, Mr Bernd Lange MEP, a member of the energy committee, said in reply to claims that the EU was delaying payment of funding.
The Union had already put 500 million ECUs into safety measures, and some 30 million ECUs had been granted recently to improve the conditions of people living in the Belarus region.