From: Greenpeace vessel MV Solo tracking Pacific Pintail
Date: THU 13-APR-95 06:29:42 GMT - DAY 50
The Pacific Pintail with its 14 tonnes of radioactive waste is in position (0600 GMT) is 22 degrees 08 minutes North, and 175 degrees and 13 minutes West. The Pintail's course is 290 degrees and the ship's speed is 14 knots. We are now some 460 miles northwest of Johnston Atoll, and some 1,250 miles northeast of the Marshall Islands. For other distances to Pacific Islands please see enclosed table.
No safe solutions to date have been found for the serious issue of disposing of radioactive waste, not even in industrialized countries where these wastes are primarily produced. The seriousness of the problems posed by radioactive contamination is now tempting other, poorer, countries to alleviate their national economic hardship by offering disposal sites for radioactive waste to the richer nations of the industrialized world.
Today, Greenpeace has released a report which challenges a proposal by the Marshall Islands to use one of their islands as a long-term storage and permanent disposal site for nuclear wastes and materials. The Marshall Islands is no newcomer to the disasters of the nuclear age. During the 1940s and 50s, while the Marshall Islands was administered as a UN Strategic Trust Territory, the United States conducted 67 atmospheric nuclear weapons test there, including one in 1954 (the Bravo Test) that contaminated many of the inhabited atolls with radioactive fall-out. As a result of increasing openness in the US about its nuclear weapons test activities, information was released in 1994 showing how the country deliberately exposed the Marshallese people to radiation as part of medical experiments.
The 40-page Greenpeace report details the disastrous history of nuclear disposal worldwide and argues that in the absence of any legal and liability framework covering such a repository in the Marshall Islands, the plan is unlikely to receive international support. Much of the radioactive waste considered by the report for disposal remains radioactive for more than ten-thousand years and combining this with anticipated climate change impacts for low lying coral atolls the report concludes that the plan is a recipe for disaster.
Moreover, given the lack of any proven technology for safe nuclear waste disposal that will not leak, it will be only a matter of time before radioactive waste will start to make its way into the marine environment. US Secretary of Energy, Hazel O'Leary has already responded to the proposal saying that US laws alone would prevent the US from participating in such a scheme.
Next week in New York the Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) begins. The radioactive waste onboard of the Pacific Pintail and that considered for dumping in the Marshall Islands have been generated in the course of plutonium separation and nuclear weapons production. Efforts to prevent nuclear proliferation are bound to fail as long plutonium remains a commercial commodity and can be freely shipped around the world. While the nuclear weapons states are encouraging this trade out of economic considerations, the non-nuclear weapons states will hopefully demand steps that will truly forward nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation. Greenpeace calls on Pacific nations to demand an end on the production and trade in commercial plutonium at the NPT Extension Conference.
Best regards and No Nukes!
Ulf Birgander (Captain)