Legal challenge to close Sellafield Plant

IRELAND will go to the United Nations tomorrow to argue that the Sellafield MOX Plant be shut down.

The country’s top law officer will tell a UN court of the “cataclysm” facing Ireland if there is a terrorist attack, or serious accident, at the troubled plant.

Attorney General Rory Brady SC, backed up by a team of senior legal and professional experts, will make his case to the United Nations Convention for Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) over the next three weeks.

The Sellafield MOX (mixed oxide plutonium) Plant takes plutonium from the reprocessing plant at Sellafield to manufacture MOX nuclear fuel - a mixture of uranium and plutonium.

The plutonium is a nuclear weapons material, and, according to the Irish Government, poses a major security and terrorist threat.

According to Greenpeace, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL), which runs the plant, plans to transport hundreds of tons of MOX fuel, containing thousands of kilograms of plutonium, from Sellafield through the Irish Sea to Europe and Japan.

“This transport also pose significant environmental and human health risks in the event of an accident,” said a Greenpeace spokesperson yesterday.

Mr Brady will argue that Britain, in authorising the MOX Plant in 2001, violated a number of articles under UNCLOS:

Britain failed to take necessary measures to prevent, reduce and control pollution of the marine environment of the Irish Sea.

Britain failed to assess the risk of terrorist attack on the MOX plant and the international movements of radioactive material associated with the plant.

Britain failed to cooperate with Ireland in the protection of the marine environment of the Irish Sea by refusing to share information about the plant.

The case will heard by five judges in the century-old Permanent Court of Arbitration, based in the Hague, in the Netherlands.

A top-level British legal team will try and argue that the court does not have jurisdiction over the Sellafield MOX Plant.

The legal challenge comes just weeks after a report from the Irish Radiological Protection Institute showed that discharges from Sellafield had actually increased in 2000 and 2001.

The report said discharges of a particularly toxic nuclear byproduct Technetium-99 had “increased significantly” since 1994.

Fianna Fáil TD Seamus Kirk yesterday said: “Sellafield represents an unacceptable threat to everyone on the Irish East coast.

"In addition to the safety breaches we all live under the very real fear that the plant could be a target for a terrorist attack.”