IRELAND: Two British ships carrying 140 kg of US weapons-grade plutonium are expected to sail into Irish waters tomorrow, according to the nuclear campaign co-ordinator for Greenpeace International.
"Around Thursday, the ships will breach Ireland's 200-mile economic exclusion zone," Mr Shaun Burnie said at a press conference in Paris yesterday. "The first point will be about 80 miles south of Cork."
In 2002, he added, the Irish Naval Service tracked the same British ships when they transported defective Japanese nuclear fuel through Irish waters.
A study commissioned by Greenpeace concluded that the sabotage by fire of a plutonium shipment would create a radioactive cloud over hundreds of square kilometres within hours. If an accident occurred at sea, Mr Burnie said, "you would have plutonium fall-out in southern Ireland".
The head of the British navy, Sir Alan West, recently said there was evidence that al-Qaeda wanted to blow up merchant ships in busy routes. Some 400 ships pass through the English Channel every day, making it the most active shipping lane in the world.
The plutonium transport should enter the channel on Friday. The Pintail and the Teal are the property of British Nuclear Fuels Ltd. One is a decoy, but both are armed with 30 mm guns and carry 13 British commandos.
"These are the only armed merchant vessels in the world," Mr Burnie said.
The plutonium was extracted from dismantled US nuclear warheads at Los Alamos laboratory in New Mexico under the terms of a September 2000 agreement between Russia and the US. Both countries agreed to reduce their stocks of military plutonium by 34 tonnes each.
This is the first time that weapons-grade plutonium has been transported by sea. It is illegal to carry it in aircraft because containers would not survive a crash.
The Pintail and Teal picked up their dangerous cargo in Charleston, South Carolina, on September 20th and are expected to deliver it to Cherbourg, on the French coast, on Saturday. It will then be carried some 1,000 km overland to a plutonium facility at Cadarache, south-eastern France.
Weapons-grade plutonium can be stored as nuclear waste or mixed with depleted uranium and transformed into tablets or rods of Mox, which is used as fuel in nuclear power plants. Anti-nuclear activists say storing plutonium as waste is safer, but the US and Russia opted for a "Mox for Peace" programme instead.
Neither the US nor Russia yet has the ability to make Mox. The G7 group of the world's most industrialised countries were to have financed a Mox plant in Russia, but the funds have not been forthcoming. Greenpeace says the reactors in question are already unsafe.
France has the world's most developed nuclear power industry and the French nuclear power company, Cogema, is scheduled to build a Mox plant in the US, at a cost of up to €300 million.
The Cadarache plant, where the US plutonium will be transformed into Mox, was shut down by the French nuclear safety authority last year because it did not meet seismic safety standards.
Greenpeace is accusing the French nuclear power industry of shoddy safety standards. French estimates of the amount of radiation released in the event of an accident and of the size of the exclusion zone which would have to be created are a fraction of estimates by US and British authorities.
Using only information available to the public, Greenpeace is able to track shipments of plutonium from La Hague to south-eastern France several times a week. Plutonium is placed in casks inside steel containers in soft-sided lorries, which are accompanied by two vehicles from the paramilitary gendarmerie.
In February 2003, Greenpeace stopped one such transport. Two hours passed before the police reacted. "Because this is US weapons-grade plutonium coming from George W. Bush, the US is understood to be a little worried about what they've seen in France," Mr Burnie said.
Britain stores 100 tonnes of plutonium at the nuclear power plant at Sellafield, said Mr Tom Clements, who follows nuclear questions for Greenpeace in Washington. "Bush, Chirac and Blair scream the loudest about fighting nuclear proliferation, but their countries are the most deeply involved in nuclear commerce."