Cullen demands access to inspect Sellafield

ENVIRONMENT Minister Martin Cullen has demanded Britain allows a first-hand inspection of an aging storage facility at the Sellafield nuclear plant feared to be at risk of leaking radioactive material.

Mr Cullen said he wanted full access to the site for senior department officials and scientists from the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland in what he described as a very frank exchange of views with Britain’s Energy Secretary Brian Wilson, yesterday.

He repeated the Irish Government’s demand for an immediate end to the dumping of radioactive waste from Sellafield into the Irish Sea and he rejected British arguments dumping at sea was safer than storing waste on land.

He told Mr Wilson the Government could accept nothing less than new storage facilities to keep the waste underground until such time as technology developed to the point where it could dispose of radioactive materials safely.

The two ministers met in Dublin yesterday amid fresh concerns about the safety of operations at Sellafield following the leaking of a letter which revealed a 50-year-old storage facility was going to be emptied and shut down to avoid the £100m-300m cost of repairing or replacing it.

The radioactive material stored there, technetium-99, is periodically discharged into the Irish Sea despite repeated objections by the Irish and Norwegian governments. Under the plan to shut down the storage facility, which has suffered corrosion to its metal roof, all the remaining technetium-99 will be dumped in the sea inside the next three years.

Prior to yesterday’s hour-long meeting, Mr Wilson told RTÉ radio the facility represented no danger to the public and he said the discharge of radioactive material was miniscule in volume and was approved by the British environmental and nuclear inspection agencies.

He complained an impression was being created that Britain was dumping dangerous materials willy-nilly into the Irish Sea and he called for a less emotive debate on the issue.

He also said he was confident a number of legal actions being taken by the Irish Government seeking the shut-down of Sellafield would rule in favour of Britain and support British management of the plant.

After the meeting, however, Mr Cullen said he had rejected Mr Wilson’s arguments and sent him away with “plenty to think about”.

He said Mr Wilson had not given him any new information about the storage facility roof and while there was a better flow of information it was still not satisfactory to assuage the concerns of the Government or the public.

He said there were also gaps in the information provided about security arrangements in place to protect Sellafield from a terrorist attack and he asked Mr Wilson for a full report.