Last week was not a good week for the nuclear industry and for the Sellafield nuclear plant in particular. Six Sellafield employees were contaminated when radioactive material leaked into a building, a train carrying nuclear waste was derailed in France en route to Sellafield and the Seanad passed a motion calling on the Government to lobby for the closure of Sellafield. Closure, as Ms Avril Doyle, Minister of State at the Department of Energy has said, would not come overnight but might come about by "gradual action consistently applied over many years". Not too many years would, no doubt, be the sentiments of many Irish people.
Closure however is not in contemplation by BNFL, the owners and operators of Sellafield. The power station and the two reprocessing operations combine to give employment to some 8,200 people, which is more than half of the entire BNFL total. The power plant is 31 years old (the outdated Magnox type) and the plant which reprocesses Magnox fuel might not last long; but the THORP plant reprocesses modern nuclear fuels. It represents an enormous investment for the company but if it is ever to become profitable it needs to increase greatly the amount of fuel it reprocesses. Building up the volume might not be difficult. Western Europe, for example, has 152 nuclear power stations, many of them potential THORP customers because Europe has so little reprocessing capacity. Nuclear services is an industry which will soon be worth $20 billion a year and THORP is the linchpin of BNFL's attack on it.
Sellafield, to be fair to BNFL, is probably one of the best run nuclear plants in the world. Chernobyl, to put it into context, was one of the worst run and there is no telling what terrible timebombs might be ticking away at nuclear plants in Eastern Europe. But while Sellafield is comparatively safe it isn't and it cannot be 100 per cent accident proof.
It is the proposed nuclear dump under the Irish Sea near Sellafield, however, which causes some people the greatest concern. The dump, for low to medium level radioactive waste, was the subject of an inquiry last year. The British government might be expected to favour a dump which is underwater because leakages from it are unlikely to threaten large populations in Britain. However, leakages from it could pose a serious threat to people living all along the east coast of Ireland. Its construction would add to the Sellafield syndrome for this State: risk of great magnitude for no benefit whatever. The chief scientist at Nirex, the company developing the dump, has serious reservations about the project. Geologists from the University of Glasgow estimate that waste could start leaking in just 40 years.
The Minister of State with responsibility for nuclear safety, Mr Emmet Stagg, brought the British ambassador, Ms Veronica Sutherland, in for discussions last Friday. He reiterated the concern over system failures at Sellafield and stressed again the Government's opposition to the proposed dump. There is, perhaps, no other environmental issue which is of as much concern to Irish people The Government has responded to this concern admirably but there must be no let up. Constant pressure must be applied to keep Sellafield discharges to the minimum and safety measures at their maximum. And everything possible must be done to stop the dump going ahead.