It had a powerful symbolism for every citizen of the twentieth century. As the Greenpeace balloon rose serenely over the world's best-loved monument to love, it was a potent reminder that the ideal of a nuclear-free world is still timely and relevant

As the nuclear club nations met in London to express concern at nuclear weapons tests in the subcontinent, Greenpeace called on India and Pakistan to sign the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and condemned the big five nuclear weapons states for an obsolete diplomacy which says: do as we say, not as we do. If they want to be part of the solution, China, France, Russia, the UK and the US must dismantle their own nuclear arsenals.

In Germany, the year took on a positive, historic aspect when a newly-elected coalition government committed itself to phasing out nuclear power. Though the real work begins now over negotiations to pin down a time frame, the undertaking is a hard-won victory for every individual who has stood up and attested: Atomkraft? Nein, danke. Premature optimism over the cancellation of German reprocessing contracts was balanced by relief in Scotland that one of the reprocessing plants at the accident-prone Dounreay site is to close after years of Greenpeace campaigning. The announcement anticipated the OSPAR decision by countries bordering the north-east Atlantic to tighten controls on the marine discharge of radioactive wastes such as those released routinely at Dounreay, Sellafield and La Hague.

"To go ahead and build a reactor at Akkuyu Bay without further study would be a totally irresponsible, if not criminal, decision"
Prof Dr Atilla Ulug, Head of Geophysics, Institute of Marine Sciences and Technology, Dokuz Eylul University

Lethal intrusions
At Sellafield, shocking levels of contamination in pigeon colonies forced the UK government to urge a six-kilometre Ôexclusion zone' for pigeon handlers around the BNFL site. Soil gathered for analysis by Greenpeace later revealed radioactive contamination at levels higher than in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl, Ukraine. At the same time, atmospheric sampling by Greenpeace at La Hague in France confirms the Cogema plutonium reprocessing plant as the premier source of avoidable aerial radioactive pollution on earth.

In the Panama Canal, Greenpeace activists boarded the British-flagged Pacific Swan to protest against the transportation 'via the back door' of radioactive nuclear waste from France and the UK to Japan.

In entering the region with a deadly cargo, Britain, France and Japan demonstrated their contempt for the legitimate aspirations to a nuclear-free world of peoples throughout the Caribbean and Central America. During its ten-hour passage through the canal zone, the freighter entered Gatun Lake which provides drinking water for one million residents of Panama City.

Arrogant ironies
Charges of environmental racism, meanwhile, were levelled at Texan plans to build a nuclear dump just 30km from the US border with Mexico. In an unprecedented show of unity and will, representatives of all of Mexico's political parties joined with Greenpeace and 32,000 signatories to reject the Sierra Blanca project.

In Bratislava, Slovakia, Greenpeace activists sounded a deafening nuclear alarm outside the headquarters of the national energy utility to mark the imminent activation of fuel rods at the Mochovce reactor. Neighbouring Austria is understandably worried by safety deficiencies at a plant where feasibility depends on early start-up of the reactor - a process which also makes subsequent safety investigations prohibitively costly.

Elsewhere in 1998, a campaign by Greenpeace slowed Turkey's moves along the road to nuclear power. Though the Turkish government had said a bid winner for the proposed plant at Akkuyu Bay would be announced during March 1998, that announcement continues to be postponed. The reactor site is just 170km from the epicentre of a recent earthquake.

Potential dangers posed by earthquakes were highlighted in Germany where the Muelheim-Kaerlich reactor was closed down in the absence of adequate seismological data for the region. The German company Siemens is one of the bidders of Turkey's Akkuyu Bay project.