Greenpeace
p. 13 · Read in the full issue
slams move
GREENPEACE has called on South Pacific countries to remind the Marshall Islands of the region’s nu clear free commitment following news that the islands have offered them selves as a dump site for the world’s nuclear waste.
“It is hypocritical that at the same time as South Pacific Forum countries, including the Marshalls, are negotiating a regional treaty to prohibit the import of hazardous waste into the region, the Marshall Islands government is pursuing such a proposal,” said Bunny McDiarmid of
Greenpeace.
“The treaty’s aim is to prevent the Pacific from becoming the world’s garbage bin and this proposal by the Marshalls opens the door for just that to happen. It’s true, as the Marshall Islands proposal states, that there is a desperate problem worldwide with the storage and disposal of nuclear waste but sending it to a coral atoll in the South Pacific is not solving the problem,” McDiarmid said. “It's dumping it on a country that has neither the capacity nor facilities to deal with it.”
Many of the northern atolls of the Marshalls are already contaminated by radioactive fall-out from US nu clear tests in the 1940 s and 19505. The proposal claims that storing nuclear waste in the Marshalls “would gain revenues that would help its people achieve economic self-sufficiency”, but McDiarmid says this is an “econ omic and environmental time bomb and the best contribution to economic self-sufficiency in the Marshalls would be to stop this in its tracks”.
McDiarmid said the proposal would mean shipping high level radioactive waste, including plu tonium, through the South Pacific Ocean for permanent storage and was contrary to the international trend towards dealing with waste where it is generated.
Meanwhile, the Pacific Concerns Resource Centre has also slammed the proposal. Director Lopeti Senituli said the Marshall Islands offer was the forerunner of things to come.
“At the Barbados Conference on Sustainable Development for Small Island Developing States, the indus trialised countries were not willing to offer new and additional financial assistance to small islands in their pursuit of sustainable development.
So the only viable option left for the islands is to become the toilet holes for the industrialised world,” Senituli said. □