'South Pacific' and Sellafield

Plastic is everywhere and it's very bad. We know because Bill Dale and the crew are always collecting it of beaches that is when Bill is not collecting the odd award or three for collecting plastic.

Now Manx Radio have gone one better than beach buddies they are exploring the Pacific Gyre a gigantic mass of seaborne plastic crud on the other side of the world. However it doesn't matter that it's the other side of the world because we live in the global village now.

Somehow though I can’t get animated about ‘South Pacific’ I keep thinking of the Western Irish Sea gyre and what’s happening to that. It's a phenomena which apparently created a concentration of Technetium 99 some years ago when levels should have been falling. Scientists and Labs started talking about things like remobilisation of historical sediments from Sellafield or when they got really cheesed off with amateurs asking question started responding in the scientific equivalent of tok pisin (sometimes called New Guinea Pidgin)..

Throughout the 1970/80/90s people would not have gone collecting things on beaches because the big bogeyman was Sellafield but now it seems we’ve learned to love it and anyway what does it matters that Technetium 99 from Sellafield turned up in the Barent Sea - more scientific tok pisin.

I suppose what Sellafield taught us is that just pouring crud into the sea was not a very sensible way of getting rid of it I suppose in that respect Sellafield and the plastic waste issue have got something in common.

People used to worry that high incidences of cancer around the Irish Sea were caused by the nuclear industry but there was never any serious effort to get to the bottom of that. Scientists like Chris Busby of Green Audit were rubbished for suggesting such links. Strange really we can be put on alert to return packets of dodgy frozen vegetables to the supermarket but Sellafield and cancer well……!

Bernard Moffatt