'The risk of an accident exposing the region to radiation hazard of the kind portrayed by opponents of the Sandpiper voyage is so infinitively small as not to be worth fretting about'



Once again, in April, the Sandpiper, a British ship carrying radioactive waste, moved as secretly as possible through the 200-mile economic zones (EEZs) of several Pacific Islands states, carrying the stuff back to Japan after reprocessing in France.

Once again, there was a routine protest about the passage of the ship from the Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat and the usual storm of contrived indignation from Greenpeace. Once again, the protests were ignored.

The voyages are more than an irritation to islands governments since their policy is to keep their region free of pollutants and in view of the rather arrogant manner in which the three countries involved with the shipments, Japan, Britain and France, injured regional feelings by running the ship through their EEZs (Exclusive Economic Zones).

The complaint from the islands is that should something go wrong and the carrier ends up gutted on a reef, the three governments have refused to issue a signed and sealed undertaking to fully compensate the region for damage and loss caused by spillage of the cargo. They have just given a bland assurance that they'll clear the mess up.

Mishaps happen, but given the specialised nature of the carrier ship, various navigation and security precautions taken and the vitrified form in which the waste is carried-captured in glass-the hysteria about the risk of the shipments whipped up by the propaganda campaign against them is misleading.

A statement attributed to Greenpeace said the Sandpiper had “breached” some EEZs. It did not. International shipping has a perfect legal right to voyage through an EEZ as long as it does not infringe the 12-mile international limit.

The risk of an accident exposing the region to radiation hazard of the kind portrayed by opponents of the Sandpiper voyage is so infinitively small as not to be worth fretting about.

As oil prices climb to heights disastrous to islands economies, we lament the inability of engineers so far to produce an affordable, economic, perfectly safe and reliable pocket-sized nuclear power station as a substitute for diesel generator oil guzzlers.