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

138 Chapter 8
appearing in the London Times on the eve of that year’s consultative meeting,
British mass media disapproved continuing radwaste disposal in 1983:
“In the long run, sea dumping is not a desirable practice. It is in principle
a bad idea to put things that may be dangerous where you cannot keep an
eye on them. Too little is known of the sea bed, underwater currents and
the food chains of marine life for the sea to be suitable for use as an oubliette
on an indefinitely expanding scale.” (“Deep-Sea Dumping,” London
Times, February 16, 1983) Radwaste disposal was seen as a dangerous
activity and scientific knowledge was perceived as being too uncertain to
guide policy. Public opinion in Europe was increasingly questioning the
wisdom of existing policy.
The 1983 Radwaste Disposal Moratorium
Encouraged by the success of the Greenpeace campaign, the anti-dumping
governmental opposition launched an attack on the scientific basis of the
radwaste disposal policy and on regime rules at the 1983 consultative meeting.
Banning radwaste disposal required that the gray and black lists of the
London Convention be amended. In accordance with the London
Convention, low-level radioactive waste would have to be moved from the
gray list to the black list. The convention stipulated, in addition, that any
amendment to the black and gray lists “will be based on scientific or technical
considerations.” 31 To halt radwaste disposal, it would therefore be
necessary to present scientific and technical evidence that such practice was
harmful and should be banned under the convention. 32 But the regime’s
strong emphasis on scientific evidence and proof of environmental damage
did not mean that scientific and technical knowledge shaped regime development
or facilitated policy coordination as the knowledge-based regime
approach claims.
Greenpeace’s campaign and developments in the Pacific expanded the
governmental coalition against radwaste disposal. By 1983, two Pacific
islands, Kiribati and Nauru, had become members of the global ocean
dumping regime in the hope that the convention could be amended to ban
all forms of radioactive waste disposal at sea (van Dyke et al. 1984, p.
743). 33 Nauru, represented by an American anti-nuclear campaigner—
Jackson Davis, a biology professor from the University of California—proposed
an immediate global ban on radwaste disposal. 34 Being heavily