Radioactive Waste Disposal at Sea: Public Ideas ... - IMO

132 Chapter 8
would follow the advice offered by acknowledged technical experts and scientists.
Contradicting these propositions, as I shall demonstrate in this chapter,
the actions of a global ENGO were decisive in the regime change,
independent of simple state interests, epistemic communities, or other more
privileged explanatory variables and theoretical approaches.
American and Japanese Interest in Radwaste Disposal
As was noted in chapter 2, Britain was dumping low-level radioactive waste
in the Atlantic almost annually from 1949 on. Starting in 1967, waste delivered
by Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland was periodically
dumped in a deep part of the Atlantic under a voluntary system of
international supervision administered by the Nuclear Energy Agency.
Although these dumping operations complied with the global ocean dumping
regime when it went into force in 1975, several nondumping nations
were opposed to them. For example, in 1978, at the consultative meeting
of the members of the global dumping regime, “many delegations expressed
the view that radioactive waste disposal in the ocean should be discouraged”
(“Report of the Third Consultative Meeting,” LDC III/12 (October
24, 1978), p. 16). As had happened in 1958 at the United Nations Conference
on the Law of the Sea, the conflict surrounding radwaste disposal
went unresolved. 2
But international worries about radwaste disposal began to increase conspicuously
in the late 1970s. In 1979 Japan announced that it planned to
experimentally dump radwaste at a site north of the Mariana Islands in the
South Pacific (“Japan Plans to Begin Ocean Disposal,” Nuclear News,
November 1980, p. 20). Japan, whose geography lacks sufficient long-term
geologic stability for repository sites, shipped spent fuel to Europe for reprocessing
at Sellafield, Britain, or at Le Hague, France. 3 According to the
Japanese government, the plan conformed to the regulations of the global
ocean dumping regime. Under the Japanese plan, 5000–10,000 drums of
nuclear waste would be dumped in 1981, when Japan would become member
of the global dumping regime. The dumping would be expanded to up
to 100,000 curies a year after the Japanese government had verified the
safety of its experimental program.
The Japanese plans caused an uproar in the Pacific region, however. A
mission from the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands soon