nuclear-news

Toxic Assets
Share The World’s resources 22nd September 2009 – George Monbiot “……………a shipwreck discovered in 480 metres of water off the Italian coast. Detectives found the ship after a tip-off from a mafioso. It appears to have been carrying drums of nuclear waste when the mafia used explosives to scuttle it. The informant, Francesco Fonti, said that his clan had been paid £100,000 to get rid of it.
What makes this story interesting is that the waste appears to be Norwegian. Norway is famous for its tough environmental laws, but a shipload of nuclear waste doesn’t go missing without someone high up looking the other way.Italian prosecutors are investigating the scuttling of a further 41 ships.

But most of them weren’t sunk, like Fonti’s vessel, off the coast of Italy; they were lost off the coast of Somalia. When the great tsunami of 2004 struck the Somali coast, it dumped and smashed open thousands of barrels on the beaches and in villages up to 10km inland(5). According to the United Nations, they contained clinical waste from western hospitals, heavy metals, other chemical junk and nuclear waste.

People started suffering from unusual skin infections, bleeding at the mouth, acute respiratory infections and abdominal haemorrhages(5a). The barrels had been dumped in the sea, a UN spokesman said, for one obvious reason: it cost European companies around $2.50 a tonne to dispose of the waste this way, while dealing with them properly would have cost “something like $1000 a tonne.”

On the seabed off Somalia lies Europe’s picture of Dorian Grey: the skeleton in the closet of the languid new world we have made.The only people who have sought physically to stop this dumping are Somali pirates.

Most of them take to the seas only for blood and booty; but some have formed coastal patrols to stop over-fishing and illegal dumping by foreign fleets(7,8,9). Some of the vessels being protected from pirates by Combined Task Force 151 – the rich world’s policing operation in the Gulf of Aden – have come to fish illegally or dump toxic waste. The warships make no attempt to stop them.

The law couldn’t be clearer: the Basel convention, supported by European directives, forbids EU or OECD nations from dumping hazardous wastes in poorer countries(10,11,12). But without enforcement the law is useless………

If the mafia were to establish itself as an effective force in this country, it would do so by way of the waste disposal industry. All over the world the cosa nostra, yakuza, triads, bratva and the rest make much of their fortune by disposing of our uncomfortable truths. I

It suits all the rich nations – even, it seems, the government of Norway – not to ask too many questions, as long as the waste goes to faraway countries of which we know little. Only when the mobs make the mistake of dumping it off their own coasts does the state start to get huffy.

Toxic Assets – STWR – Share The World’s Resources