DUBLIN, Ireland, Oct. 13 (UPI) -- Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern accused Britain of timing the reopening of a controversial nuclear waste reprocessing plant on the Irish Sea to coincide with the international terrorism crisis and vowed to fight for its closure.
In remarks published Saturday, Ahern called the Sellafield plant in northwest England's Cumbrian region a greater security risk than before because of the international terrorism crisis and a continuing source of pollution threatening Ireland.
The nuclear site's reprocessing facility, which processes a blend of plutonium and uranium, was shut down last year after a scandal over falsification of safety records that led to a management shake-up and loss of millions of dollars of reprocessing business. The plant was given the go-ahead last week, but a spokesman told United Press International it had not yet resumed reprocessing of spent fuel.
Speaking at the 75th annual conference of the ruling Fianna Fail party, the prime minister said on Friday he was appalled when Blair went ahead with the decision to resume the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel from Germany, Japan and other countries.
He said that the plant, which lies only 120 miles from Dublin, represented "a significant additional and totally unacceptable threat to our environment and to our national security."
Ahern said Britain's decision to go ahead with the resumption of the plant's operations "has all the hallmarks of a bad news story hastily released in the midst of a momentous international crisis in the hope that most people will be distracted."
He said the opening of the plant would mean the Irish Sea was used as "a highway for the transport of highly dangerous nuclear fuel to and from nuclear plants around the world. And this is in addition to the existing and equally unacceptable activities of Sellafield."
He said the plant was "being kept on a life support machine" by the British taxpayer.
Ahern's comments came the day after an article in the New Scientist magazine warned a terrorist strike on Sellafield could release 44 times more radioactive material than the 1980s disaster at Chernobyl.
He said he had told Blair of his opposition to the Irish Sea being used "as a kitchen sink."
Ahern is also facing pressure from the opposition to take a tougher with Britain. On Thursday Senator Fergus O'Dowd, of the Fine Gael opposition party, called on the British government to establish a no-fly zone over Sellafield.
The New Scientist article cited comments by Gordon Thompson, executive director of the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Massachusetts, on the risk of the plant being rammed by suicide hijackers in control of an airliner, as with the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"Four million terabecquerels of radioactivity would contaminate large parts of Britain and, depending on which way the wind was blowing, Ireland, continental Europe and beyond," the article said.
British Nuclear Fuels, the state operators of the plant, called the article "grossly irresponsible" and announced it was tightening safety and security procedures.
Environmentalist groups Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have initiated High Court proceedings in a bid to stop the plant from reopening.
The waste reprocessing operations, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, suffered a setback in the late 1990s after Sellafield was found to be falsifying records to fudge on nuclear safety issues. Its key clients in Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Japan suspended business and the company lost hundreds of millions of dollars in business as a result.
Independent public inspectors prosecuted Sellafield twice last year for alleged breaches of safety rules. Northern European governments joined the campaign for its closure, arguing radioactive contamination flowing from the plant into the Irish Sea threatens marine resources for the whole region.
But nuclear reprocessing is big business, and BNFL reported revenues of over $1.5 billion from the German reprocessing business alone over the last 20 years. The German work accounts for 10 per cent of Sellafield business.
Greenpeace campaigners say almost 1,000 tons of German nuclear waste -- about 200 flasks -- are due to be delivered to Sellafield over the next four years.
"With every gram of nuclear waste that leaves Germany for Sellafield," said Greenpeace nuclear campaigner Pete Roche "the Irish Sea becomes a bit more heavily radioactively contaminated."
He said the Sellafield plant was one of the largest sources of radioactive emissions into the environment in the whole of Europe. "The public must feel they've been taken for a ride," he said. BNFL has said the plant is safe after last year's safety reviews and management shake-up.
