IRISH local authorities and the Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland will be represented today at a conference in Manchester on the potential dangers of storing highly radioactive waste in tanks at Sellafield.
The conference is being organised by a coalition of nuclear free local authorities in the UK. They produced a report last year suggesting that a serious accident involving the HLW (high level waste) tanks could be worse than Chernobyl.
The RPII has declared that the waste stored in these tanks should be "drastically reduced . . . as a matter of urgency". It also wants a full scale risk assessment carried out and published.
According to Ms Bernadette Connolly, a Green Party member of Dun Laoghaire Rathdown council, a failure of just one HLW tank at Sellafield could be cat catastrophic. She will represent the General Council of County Councils at the Manchester conference.
Research funded by the steering committee of UK Nuclear Free Local Authorities in 1995 said it could result in between 10 000 and 30,000 deaths from cancer, the evacuation of 40,000km2 of land and the interdiction of crops and livestock for decades.
"This leaves no room for complacency and sitting back until an accident occurs before we seek the best possible safety practices installed and operating," Ms Connolly said. This was in the interests of everyone on both sides of the Irish Sea, she added.
Last month the General Council of County Councils recommended that each of its member authorities should contribute £700 to support further research on safety at Sellafield by the NFLA's steering committee.
The NFLA, which represents over 100 UK local authorities, reported recently that Britain's Nuclear Installations Inspectorate had put BNFL's commercial interests before public protection by allowing the accumulation of hazardous liquid waste.
The inspectorate considers that the HLW tanks at Sellafield are only "acceptably safe" and "do not meet modern safety standards in some respects".
However, its failure to act on the matter has been condemned by the NFLA as a "business as usual" approach.
A spokeswoman for BNFL said that high level liquid waste had been safely stored at Sellafield for more than 40 years in double walled stainless steel tanks with concrete shielding. A series of "failsafe measures" were in place to prevent accidents, she added.
She said that the waste was being vitrified - turned into glass - to make it even safer.
