Safety Failure at Sellafield

Earlier this month vital cooling water was kept from tanks containing highly radioactive waste at Sellafield thereby creating a potential contamination disaster.

Eddie McGrady MP said;

“Safety failures at Sellafield have become as regular as the denials put out by Sellafield Management in response to these failures. We do not have to be experts in the area of nuclear fuel, storage and reprocessing to know that a “failure” in the storage arrangements for Highly Radioactive Waste could result in an environmental and humanitarian disaster. Indeed experts in this field reporting recently for the Norwegian Government have calculated that the release of only one percent of the Sellafield storage tank’s waste would cause radioactive fallout in Norway five times higher than in the areas worst affected by Chernobyl. Being considerably closer than Norway to the Sellafield Plant this is shocking confirmation of the concerns we have about the potential disaster for Ireland in the event, not just of a complete nuclear fall-out but the potential aftermath of one of these regular “failures” at the plant.

I have called on the Northern Ireland Executive and the Minister for the Environment on many occasions to ally with the Irish Government on the Irish Government’s continued call for the closure of the Sellafield plant, its complete rundown and a stop to its re-development plans. However, to date the Minister for the Environment has failed in this regard.

Once again I would make a plea to the Northern Ireland Executive in light of this latest serious safety breach, to re-evaluate its position on Sellafiled, and protect the interest of this part of the Island by calling for the removal of this nuclear threat only a few miles from our coast.

Ends.