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Now that we know that the Labour/Tory/Liberal assertion that 11,000 jobs bound up with Faslane (less than 1,000 according to London’s Ministry of Defense) is a nonsense, Gary Mulvaney is in the classic quandary of all Unionist’s – whether to stick up for the national interest or to defer to that of England’s.

Is Gary Mulvaney now arguing that the nuclear carcasses of the Westminster government are a price worth paying for England’s writ?

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“I’ll be philosophical. Until about two billion years ago, it was impossible to have any life on earth; that is, there was so much radiation on earth you couldn’t have any life — fish or anything. Gradually, about two billion years ago, the amount of radiation on this planet and probably in the entire system reduced and made it possible for some form of life to begin… Now when we go back to using nuclear power, we are creating something which nature tried to destroy to make life possible… Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it… I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. Have I given you an answer to your question?”

On the hazards of nuclear power.
Testimony to Congress (28 January 1982);
Published in Economics of Defense Policy:
Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee,
Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982)

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Windscale was used to develop nuclear weapons, a plutonium production plant and a separation plant for separating plutonium and uranium from spent fuel. For those that remember the Windscale disaster in 1957 (now known as Sellafield) it was heralded as the World’s worst reactor accident until the US Three Mile Island event in 1979.

The reason for highlighting this event or rather a catalogue of events with numerous others since; is that the radio-active contamination can still be detected in seabed sediments around Argyll, in fact all round Scotland and as a result of our coastal currents and that of the effects of the North Atlantic Drift Current, these deposits can be traced even as far away as Norway.

It has been estimated that around 75% of the Clyde waters flush into the waters of the west coast of Argyll, from the Mull of Kintyre northwards. With potential dumps being used in the Clyde and Ayr the effects of any leaks becomes obvious. This will have a serious knock-on effect to fishing and shellfish industries as well as aquaculture and wildlife tourist based industries.

One of the most worrying matters that have concerned the Windscale/Sellafield “leaks” is that many of them were thought to be deliberate. For further information visit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale#The_Windscale_fire . The Windscale disaster was also made into a BBC Documentary in 2007, titled; “Windscale: Britain’s Biggest Nuclear Disaster”.

Leaks or spills of radionuclide’s cause radioactive contamination; these particles can have “half-lives” reaching many thousands of years and are deposited in seabed sediments alongside normal coastal processes. Depending upon location some of these contaminated deposits lie only a few centimeters under the seabed surface and can be re-introduced into marine systems by commercial activities such as scallop dredging.

Effects upon people can be devastating and are related to proximity to the source. People who live and work close to the coast are more likely to be affected as are those who consume sea produce especially contaminated shellfish. With numerous “contracts” of accepting nuclear waste products still in the pipeline any question of placing this toxic material in or close to highly productive waters is nothing short of an accident waiting to happen.

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Simply put, and you have done that in your summation, we have no knowledge after using it for almost fifty years of how to safely store nuclear waste material. We are building up a grim inheritance for future generations.

There must be more suitable uses to be made of the horrendous expenditure that we invest in such obscene weapons of mass destruction.

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