A chara, - The people who run Sellafield are up to their old tricks again. In the latest issue of Sellafield Newsletter, British Nuclear Fuels (BNFL) states that a study published last year "conclusively excluded environmental factors, such as using beaches and eating seafood as a potential cause of childhood leaukaemia" in areas close to the nuclear complex. That statement is inaccurate and deliberately misleading.
The study which BNFL referred to was conducted by Britain's Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment (COMARE). Nowhere in its study does it claim to have "conclusive evidence" that any environmental factor, including radiation, could be ruled out as the cause of the abnormally high level of leukaemia in areas surrounding Sellafield, which in the case of the nearby village of Seascale has been ten times the national average.
Although the study disputed theories, such as those in the report by the late Dr Martin Gardner, that radiation may be the root of some of the health problems near Sellafield, it openly admitted that its findings were not what BNFL terms "conclusive". Its three conclusions were: that the excess of childhood leukaemia and non Hodgkins lymphona in Seascale is "highly unlikely" to be due to chance; that no one factor could account for the increase; and that interactions between different factors could not be ruled out, but there was no way of "quantifying their effects or explaining why such interaction would be unique to Seascale".
The only conclusive evidence in those findings is that, on the basis of current knowledge, no one factor could account for the high level of childhood leukaemia near Sellafield.
A study published earlier this month by two French cancer researchers - Dr Dominique Pobel and Dr Jean Francoise Veal - also casts doubt on any effort to rule out radiation as a cause of health problems near nuclear complexes.
They found that children playing on a beach near the Le Hague complex on the Normandy coast ran three times the risk of contracting leukeamia than most French children. And they concluded "there is some convincing evidence of a causal role for environmental radiation exposure from recreational activities on beaches" near the complex.
Le Hague is one of the world - three centres for the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel, the other two being at Sell afield in Cumbria and Dounreay in Scotland. Perhaps then the most telling point made by the two French researchers is that "the mode of operations and nature of discharges at La Hague are more similar to those at Sellafield and Dounreay than other nuclear plants". Curiously that point is omitted in an article about this study in the latest Sellafield Newsletter.
The much touted idea that Sellafield was given a "clean bill of health" by the COMARE report does not hold up to any scrutiny. No matter what BNFL says or does, the continued operation of Sellafield has too many risks for the Irish people. The Government's decision to support the Stop Thoip Alliance Dundalk (STAD) in its ongoing legal battle - against the complex is to be welcomed wholeheartedly. But the Government must also commit itself to legal action at EU or international level against the plant, should the courageous STAD action prove unsuccessful.
Offices of the European Parliament,
43 Molesworth Street,
Dublin 2.