DUTCH POWER PLANT REFUSES TO TAKE BACK ITS OWN NUCLEAR WASTE DUMPED IN FRANCE

Amsterdam, 24 June 1997

Four Greenpeace activists delivered this afternoon a portion of the nuclear waste from the COGEMA reprocessing plant in France to the nuclear power station of Borssele, in the south of the Netherlands. The Director of the power plant refused to take responsibility for it, claiming that COGEMA has a licence to discharge it. Although it is a small amount of radioactive waste, according to Dutch law it is nuclear waste and Greenpeace demands that it must be safely stored and not dumped at sea.

A concrete container with 250 grams of radioactive sediment and 150 ml of liquid effluent, equal to the share of Borselle waste taken by Greenpeace off the French coast, was carried in front of the entrance of the power plant at 12h30 Thursday 24 June. Despite attempts by the Dutch Ministry of the Environment to confiscate the waste on Monday night, Greenpeace refused to hand over the waste. The Greenpeace ship, the Rainbow C, left the port of Scheveningen at 23h00 Monday evening and headed towards Borssele power plant.

" We want to deliver the waste to where it belongs : to the owners, the nuclear power stations in the countries which have contracts with COGEMA. The attitude of the Director of Borselle is that it is alright to dump waste in France, but not to store it safely in The Netherlands", said Diederick Samsom of Greenpeace.

Greenpeace started its investigations around Cap La Hague three weeks ago, taking sampling of the sediments and the water at the end of the COGEMA discharge pipe. The results of the analysis were dramatic. The discharge water from La Hague is 17 million times more radioactive than normal sea water, and the sediments show a concentration of dangerous radioactive isotopes, including americium, which is one of the most radiotoxic substances in the world, as deadly as plutonium, and Cobalt 60, which provokes various forms of cancers and blood-poisoning.

Greenpeace wants the Borssele nuclear plant to accept the waste and store it under strict safety and security measures. The next logical step according to the environmental organisation would be the full cancellation of all Dutch reprocessing contracts with COGEMA's reprocessing plant of La Hague.

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