Blog: Oceans

Radioactive waste from Sellafield has been found in Scottish farmed salmon sold in major British supermarkets. Tests commissioned by Greenpeace revealed traces of radioactive waste in packets of fresh and smoked salmon.

Tc-99 is a byproduct of Magnox fuel reprocessing. Dr David Santillo, a scientist at Greenpeace's research laboratories at Exeter University, said: "Tc-99 should not be there at all. It is inexplicable yet significant. Scottish salmon is marketed as something that comes from a pristine environment."

Whale tail

Melting polar ice is threatening the main food source for Antarctic blue whales and could lead to their extinction, an international environmental group said yesterday. The whales feed on small sea creatures known as krill, which in turn eat microscopic marine algae. These live in sea ice and are released in the summer when the ice melts.

In 1979, three years before the historic moratorium decision, the IWC agreed to an Indian Ocean sanctuary. Fifteen years later, in 1994, Greenpeace was instrumental in securing an additional sanctuary in the Southern Ocean which covers all the waters around Antarctica, so ensuring that there can never be legal whaling again in the feeding grounds of three quarters of the world's whales.

This afternoon the Government confirmed what we always thought to be true that you can't trust what a Minister says. About five years ago a Minister stated that the Habitats Directive would be applied up to 200 miles offshore in order to protect all whales and dolphins. And despite the fact that this was said in a written statement to Parliament, the Government QC claimed that he got it all wrong and that Greenpeace couldn't rely on what he said.