James Bannon (Fine Gael)

I saw for myself what was happening there. Several times when I tried to pose questions that members of the public are posing to public representatives, I was told that my questions were out-of-date and that there was no need to ask them because safety could be guaranteed at Sellafield. I spent two days visiting the plant and returned to Ireland with a great sense of fear.

If we needed any further proof that we are being treated with contempt by our UK counterparts, we need only look at the recent major leak of radioactive material at the THORP nuclear reprocessing facility at Sellafield. The Radiological Protection Institute of Ireland, RPII, was only notified of the accident three days after it occurred. This made a farce of the signing of the bilateral agreement on the notification of nuclear incidents and the exchange of information on nuclear facilities, which the Minister, Deputy Roche, signed last December. This agreement provides for both Governments to take appropriate measures in the event of a serious nuclear incident. Clearly, the British Government was unaware of its commitments or decided to ignore them for a considerable period in regard to the recent incident.

Reprocessing is carried out at the THORP facility at Sellafield, which reprocesses spent nuclear fuel to recover its plutonium and uranium content. It is now likely to be closed for an undetermined time as a result of this accident. An estimated 83 cu. m. of radioactive liquid — enough to fill two normal family living rooms to the ceiling — escaped from a broken pipe into a concrete chamber before it was detected on 18 April last. As this chamber is now heavily contaminated, it is unsafe for workers to enter. Any clean-up operation may have to be carried out using robots or other remote control instruments. It is still unclear when the leakage began and the incident has been classified as category three and described as serious on the seven-point international nuclear event scale. The spilling of two chambers of radioactive liquid cannot be dismissed as being of no threat to Ireland or our food chain, with the resultant health and economic consequences.