RADIOACTIVE WASTE MANAGEMENT: A Greenpeace perspective

摘要

Greenpeace International is a relatively large non-governmental organization, with presences in 40 countries. It does not accept money from governments or from business corporations. Most (90% or more) of its money comes from private individuals. For some projects, it accepts money from foundations, but only if there are no strings attached. Greenpeace has been accused from time to time of being 'non-scientific' or even 'anti-science'. In my opinion, however, Greenpeace has access to and understands the high quality scientific information necessary in order to tackle environmental issues. I shall describe briefly how Greenpeace came to concern itself with radioactive waste management. When it was established in 1971 in Canada, the issue on which Greenpeace focused was nuclear weapons testing. Soon afterwards, it started to focus on marine pollution, and in that context it regarded radioactive contaminants in the same way as it regarded other environmental contaminants such as lead, mercury, dioxins and so on. The approaches adopted by it for dealing with non-radioactive hazardous substances have proved useful in dealing with radioactive ones. Our main concern in dealing with radioactive and other contaminants has been that harm should be prevented. Of course, there are cases where the harm has already been done, sometimes a long time ago; in such cases, however, we draw attention to the problem. We also draw attention to problems which we know to be imminent even if we cannot yet provide the scientific proof that they are imminent.