NUCLEAR POLLUTION

Lobsters in the Irish Sea near a plutonium processing plant in England have been found to be contaminated with radiation. According to Greenpeace, the nuclear plant at Sellafield is discharging over 2 million gallons of radioactive effluent into the ocean each day. If lobsters are contaminated, aren't fish and ocean vegetation also contaminated?
In a new conference UK Environment Minister Michael Meacher said that Britain might have to dump radioactive pollution stockpiled at its Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant into the Irish Sea after 2006 as tanks storing the waste age and may become unsafe. He said the government was researching ways to store the waste permanently onland but if this was not successful, then the radioactive liquid technetium-99 kept in offshore tanks may be dumped in the sea. "If the tanks can't take it beyond 2006, then we might have to look at an alternative solution... to discharge (their contents) into the Irish Sea quickly," Meacher told a news conference.

"Low-level" radioactive discharge flows into the Atlantic from the French plutonium plant at Cap de la Hague, Brittany. According to Greenpeace, the La Hague factory is the single largest source of radioactive contamination in the European Community.
There have been attempts by a U.S company to build a nuclear waste storage facility on the Marshall Islands. Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii in response has said, "The Pacific is not a dumping ground for nuclear waste." Also, with the threat of a rise in sea levels from global warming looming, it would be the ultimate act of irresponsibility to construct such facilities.
Taiwan has sent 200,000 barrels of nuclear wastes to North Korea. North Korea, a destitute country which cannot feed its own people, cannot be counted on to store nuclear wastes in a responsible manner. In Pakistan there has been clandestine dumping of nuclear wastes in the coastal waters of Balochistan. Balochistan is Pakistan's largest province, located in the southwest corner of the country sharing a border with Iran. The highest court in Pakistan has been informed that a European ship "Eastern Line" had dumped about 150 drums of highly toxic nuclear waste in the open sea near the town of Gadani, about 30 miles northwest of Karachi.
Nuclear wastes are piling up at docks and shipyards near Vladivostok, reported the San Francisco Chronicle's David Perlman on December 18, 1996. The inventory of wastes includes the reactor cores of 50 decommissioned missile submarines, plus countless separate fuel rods containing plutonium and various other toxic fission products. This is in close proximity to known nuclear waste ocean dumping areas off Vladivostok. "The Russians are very much aware of the possibility of a worst-case scenario, like a major explosion or fire that could release radioactivity into the atmosphere" said Bruce Molnia, a geologist and arctic environmental researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey. The article mentions that the best estimates of nuclear wastes include 16,000 cubic meters of high-level solid wastes. At one time the Soviet Union routinely dumped "low-level" wastes into the Sea of Japan near Vladivostok, but that practice ended in 1993 after President Boris Yeltsin was notified that tons of contaminated nuclear reactor cores and high-level wastes from Soviet nuclear weapons tests had been dumped into the eastern Arctic Ocean off the Kola Peninsula throughout the Cold War.