MEP warns on new nuclear waste dump

February 1997

Greystones Green PArty MEP Nuala Ahern has warned that radioactive leakage from the proposed new nuclear waste dump at Sellafield could cause ‘a worse disaster than Chernobyl’.

Responding to a newly published report on the proposed NIREX dump in Cumbria, Deputy Ahern said that ‘the leak could take less than 40 years to appear, although the waste will continue to be lethal for 24,000 years.’

Slamming nuclear industry claims that the leakage into the Irish Sea could be ‘diluted to safe levels’, she said that the findings of an independent review body demonstrated clearly that the proposed new dump would be dangerous and unacceptable.

The report which has just emerged, and which the Greysotnes MEP claimed had been kept secret by NIREX for two years, said that radioactive chlorine and iodine could leak rapidly to the land surface, and that the risk of death from this leakage would exceed the safety limit by a factor of eight.