British Nuclear Fuels Ltd is attempting to stifle public debate by seeking injunctions today in the United Kingdom and France to prevent Greenpeace protesting against a secret shipment of nuclear weapons-usable plutonium fuel from Europe to Japan, the environment group reported today.Two British freighters, the Pacific Pintail and Pacific Teal, are due to leave the port of Barrow in northern England imminently to undertake the transport to Japan.
British Nuclear Fuels Ltd (BNFL) is seeking an injunction in the High Court in London today to prevent Greenpeace interfering with the shipment. This will be the 10th injunction BNFL has sought against Greenpeace in the past decade. BNFL has also taken legal action in France, and a hearing of a wide- ranging injunction being sought by the company, with a penalty of 1 million francs, will be held in the French port of Cherbourg at 2 pm this afternoon. A French court earlier this week granted an injunction to the French reprocessing company COGEMA, providing a 100,000 francs ($US15,000) penalty for any Greenpeace activist found within 100 metres of the convoy carrying the plutonium fuel.
"This is a desperate and heavy handed response from an industry which is determined to keep its dangerous and dirty operations a secret from the public," said Greenpeace UK spokesperson Pete Roche. "BNFL presumably hopes to muzzle all opposition to the shipments by imposing severe legal and financial constraints on all protest. However Greenpeace is determined that the public interest be defended and that the right to know about such dangerous shipments is maintained."
Greenpeace said the shipments could be the first of some 80 plutonium fuel transports from Europe to Japan, which has serious implications for nuclear non-proliferation and the environment globally, and yet these shipments were being kept secret. "There has been no opportunity for public comment or debate about whether they should occur, either in the countries which are shipping the plutonium fuel, or in the many nations it will pass on its still secret route to Japan," said Roche.
Some 50 nations have previously objected to nuclear transports and Caribbean states and the New Zealand Government have already expressed formal opposition to this shipment, the first commercial plutonium fuel shipment to Japan. Previous nuclear shipments have traveled on three different routes: around the Cape of Good Hope in Southern Africa and upthrough the Tasman Sea between Australia and New Zealand, Cape Horn on the tip of Latin America and also through the Caribbean and the Panama Canal.
BNFL is currently preparing to load one ship in Barrow, in the English north-west, with a cargo of eight plutonium fuel elements containing some 225 kilograms of plutonium. A second ship in Barrow will travel to the French port of Cherbourg where it will be loaded with 32 MOX fuel elements containing an estimated 221 kilograms of plutonium. The two ships are then expected to rendezvous at sea, off the French Atlantic coast, and continue together on the 20,000 mile voyage to Japan.
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