UK Ministers will be conspicuous by their absence at this week’s BNFL/Bellona and Lofoten mot Sellafield conference at BNFL’s Summergrove. The lone green NGO voice will be that of Mr Rick Nickerson of the KIMO Secretariat in the Shetlands.
Despite the attendance of Norway’s Environment Minister and other Ministry staff, representatives from the Norwegian Embassy in London, senior politicians from Norway and Russia and a member of the Nordic Council, high level UK government representatives are surprisingly absent from an event that will concentrate on Sellafield’s discharges of Technetium 99 (Tc-99}. Over recent years these discharges have been the subject of major discord between Scandanavian Governments and Westminster.
A CORE spokesperson said “ With the surprising lack of Government interest and with the hand of BNFL now stamped all over the conference, we view the event as a lost opportunity for the Scandanavians. We’ve reluctantly decided not to attend the event which is a shadow of the original wide-ranging conference we’d agreed last year to help organise and to which we were to present a local perspective. With many major topics now off the agenda, delegates appear to be getting a limited and BNFL-friendly view of Sellafield “.
In December last year, BNFL was invited by Bellona and Lofoten mot Sellafield to send delegates to the conference. A request was also made for the company to provide a site tour for participants who were to be informed not only about Tc-99 but also ‘the broader work at Sellafield regarding reprocessing, the production of MOX fuel and the recycling of plutonium ‘. On behalf of Bellona, inquiries by CORE at West Cumbrian conference venues were well advanced, with Summergrove a leading contender
In February this year CORE was warned that BNFL’s Public Affairs Department had advised Bellona that ‘it was out of the question that Summergrove could be rented before BNFL had decided whether or not to participate in the conference. If they did decide to participate, they were interested in taking over some of the practical organising ‘.
CORE added “ This has been a typically shrewd move by BNFL to control events. Bellona and Lofoten mot Sellafield deserve full credit for the original idea and we hope their delegates manage to salvage something worthwhile from the conference “.