Moruroa

When the

disaster hits

RADIOACTIVE waste from French underground nuc lear tests at Moruroa Atoll is seeping towards the surface faster than has been previously claimed, warns a leading New Zealand scientist.

Professor Manfred Hochstein, director of Auckland Uni versity’s Geothermal Institute, believes the waste could come to the top of the atoll in about 30 years not the thousands of years claimed by French authorities.

“It is not a matter of 2000 years, nor is it a matter of 100 years,” he says. “In about 30 years the disaster will hit us.”

Speaking in May at a conference of the New Zealand branch of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Professor Hochstein revealed that he had tried to pre sent his findings to the NZ National Radiation Laboratory which has been accused by several environmental groups as being partisan in favour of French testing.

He has also sent data from his “reservoir model”, a five-year computer study into the effects of radioactive contamination on Moruroa. The computer model has demonstrated that nuc lear explosions have seriously cracked and weakened the hard basalt core of the atoll.

Hochstein’s theory has been confirmed by analysis of data collected at Moruroa by French oceanographer Jacques Cous teau during a 1987 visit to the atoll. Although Cousteau de clared testing safe at present, his data showed the presence of radioactive caesium 137 in lagoon water.

“The only objective data has been from the Cousteau report and that still showed a mild leakage of radioactive material equivalent to nuclear power station in Europe,” he says.

Opponents of the nuclear tests were embarrassed in April when a French news agency report purported to cite a group of 22 French medical experts as saying the risks of radiation at Moruroa were “infinitesimal”.

The report came out two days before the group’s official Press statement was made public.

The doctors said in a statement published in the Tahiti newspaper La Depeche after a two-day visit: “Without pre judging the situation of Fangataufa and Hao atolls, the delega tion considered that there is not a major radiological risk on Moruroa atoll at present.

“However, [we] are not convinced of the absence of medium and long-term risks because of the strong concentration of radioactive material in the sub-soil of the atoll.” □