THE HIGH-MINDED call by European environment ministers for Britain to stop dumping waste into the sea from its Sellafield nuclear plant is fine in itself, but far from practical when it comes to implementation.

For the fact is that the only certain way of achieving the zero discharges wanted by the ministers meeting in Portugal is to shut down this nuclear reprocessing plant completely - when, apart from the thousands of jobs it provides, it is fulfilling an actual need

And, in defending the UK position that some discharges from Sellafield need to continue, Britain's environment minister John Prescott is not playing the European maverick but is simply being more realistic than his counterparts.

The fact is that the reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel consumes such huge amounts of water that there is no way it can be stored.

And if reprocessing was abandoned, both as a method and an industry, it would mean that large amounts of highly radioactive spent fuel from nuclear power stations would have to be stored somewhere on dry land, posing a huge environmental problem. The crux of the issue is whether the three million gallons of waste water discharged daily into the Irish Sea from Sellafield is safe, or whether the concerns about it are founded in fact or anti-nuclear neurosis.

Sellafield's owners say that after it has been cleaned the waste water discharged is harmless, containing only minute radiation.

But perhaps, then, if others are not satisfied or convinced that this is safe, the way forward is for Sellafield to strive, as Mr Prescott prefers, for reducing radioactive discharges to natural background levels - and for them to be covered by independent international monitoring.

Surely, this is more realistic and sensible than the impractical call for zero discharges which do not solve the nuclear waste dilemma in any case.

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