Protesters head for nuclear waste ship

Anti-nuclear activists set sail on two boats from Sydney today to join a flotilla that was planning to intercept a ship carrying nuclear material from Japan to Britain.

The shipment - 255 kilos of rejected reactor fuel - a mixture of plutonium and uranium known as MOX, left the Japanese port of Takahama on its two-month journey on Thursday.

The radioactive material was being taken back to its British manufacturer on the Pacific Pintail, a cargo ship armed with deck-mounted machine guns.

Security details, such as the route of the ship and another armed vessel accompanying it on its journey, have not been made public.

Opponents say they are concerned that the shipment is vulnerable to terrorist attack or could be used for making nuclear weapons claims which the Japanese government has denied.

Today, the protesters leaving Sydney said they were joining a flotilla of yachts carrying some 50 activists from Australia and New Zealand, and hoped to intercept the Pintail in the Tasman Sea around July 16.

’’We’re making a symbolic line across the Tasman Sea to show that we’re against the shipment and we think it is very dangerous,’’ said Dutchman Inigo Wijnen, who set sail on his yacht, The Love of Gaia, with his three-year-old son Joshua.

A third yacht will leave Australia from Ballina in New South Wales state on Monday, the protesters said.

It was not clear if the protesters were part of any organisation.

Japan’s Kansai Electric Power Co. imported the fuel in 1999 for an experimental nuclear power programme. But the fuel’s maker, British Nuclear Fuels, later admitted it had falsified records on the fuel’s quality and agreed to ship it back to Britain.

Kansai Electric officials said last week that they were confident the shipment was secure. The Japanese government also strongly denied that the fuel could be used to make nuclear weapons because the plutonium was not weapons-grade.