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

136 Chapter 8
low-level radioactive waste disposal. And, as was noted in chapter 5, the congressional
sponsors of the bill to regulate ocean dumping had been strongly
opposed to the dumping of “hot” high-level radioactive waste at sea.
Greenpeace’s Campaign against Radwaste Disposal
In 1978, Greenpeace launched a campaign against the European dumping
in the Atlantic Ocean. 22 Greenpeace, since its founding in Canada in 1971,
had become arguably the world’s largest and most effective international
environmental pressure group. The European dumping operation took
place at a site 4000 meters below sea level, located approximately 700 kilometers
off Spain’s northwest coast. The nuclear industry feared that the
campaign also was intended to mobilize public opinion to prevent a
resumption of dumping by the United States or a start of such operations
by Japan (Rippon 1983, p. 79).
Greenpeace intended to hinder the annual European dumping operation.
The organization hoped to obstruct the dumping operation by positioning
inflatable dinghies underneath the dumping ship’s platforms from which
the containers were rolled into the sea. The dinghies were operated from
the Rainbow Warrior—the same ship was used to protest against French
nuclear tests on the Polynesian island of Mururoa in the South Pacific. 23
The Greenpeace ship followed a freighter to the dump site. At a press conference
in Britain, Greenpeace showed film of its unsuccessful attempts to
keep the dumper ship from tipping more than 5000 barrels of radioactive
waste into the sea. Greenpeace’s charge that the dumping violated the rules
of the global dumping regime was rejected by the British government, which
declared that the material dumped only had insignificant amounts of
radioactivity (Morris 1978). 24 In the summer of 1979, Greenpeace again
set out to obstruct the dumping. The British press reported how the dumper
ship crew’s used powerful fire hoses to prevent the protesters from placing
dinghies under the cranes dumping drums of radioactive waste into the sea
(Allen-Mills 1979).
In 1982, three Dutch ships were responsible for the annual dumping
operation. The international press reported how dinghies launched from
the Rainbow Warrior were placed under the ships’ cranes. People on Spain’s
northwest coast, where fishing is one of the main industries, strongly
protested against the dumping and dispatched two trawlers with local