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

Changing the Global Ocean Dumping Regime 143
their safety when handling the waste, 41 passed a resolution in favor of halting
ocean dumping of radioactive materials (“Four Unions Back Ban on A-
Waste Dumping,” Guardian, April 7, 1983). 42 A month later, the opposition
was further strengthened when the Transport and General Workers’ Union,
the train drivers’ union known as ASLEF, and the National Union of
Railwaymen, at a meeting organized by Greenpeace, agreed on an attempt
to halt ocean dumping of radioactive waste. 43 In June of the same year, the
British seamen announced a ban on handling the waste. The seamen refused
to crew a “Greenpeace-proof” ship (fitted with a hole in the hull through
which drums of waste could be dropped) that had been chartered by Britain,
Belgium, and Switzerland to carry out dumping (Pearce 1983). 44 The
Transport and General Workers’ Union and ASLEF similarly called on their
members not to handle or transport the waste. Transport union boycotts
were also called in Switzerland and in Belgium (Curtis 1984, p. 68). If the
British government let the armed forces carry out the dumping, as the
unions expected, an armada of protest vessels was expected to sail from
Spain to converge on the dumping site. “We understand there are already
plans for quite a lot of vessels to leave Spain,” explained an executive officer
of the Transport and General Workers’ Union, “and we would hopefully
form part of that armada” (Ardill 1983). In February and July of 1983,
Spanish Friends of the Earth, ecologists, and left-wing protesters demonstrated
before the British Embassy in Madrid in protest against the plan to
dump. In July, more than 150 British flags were burned in several towns
and cities in Galicia, and in one city Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was
burned in effigy. 45
Mounting national and international pressure orchestrated by
Greenpeace forced the British government to reverse its policy. In
September, the British opposition was further strengthened when the seamen’s
union won backing from the Trade Unions Congress for a motion
condemning the use of the world’s oceans as a dumping ground for nuclear
waste and demanding that development of land-based disposal facilities be
accelerated. The position of the seamen was that “radioactive waste should
not be dumped irretrievably but should be stored in above-ground, engineered
facilities in a location acceptable to the local communities
involved.” 46 The Trade Unions Congress furthermore urged the British government
to comply with the decision made at the February meeting of the
global ocean dumping regime; this decision was carried by a vote of