Belfast could offer home for Britain's nuclear cast-offs

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday April 22, 2002 19:41 by publo

I swear there'll be ruckus if they try and push something like this through.

By Diarmaid Fleming and Seán Mac Cárthaigh
Dublin, Ireland, 21 April, 2002

Pity Britain's poor Ministry of Defence. It has 12 rusting submarines from the 1960s, each one the length of Croke Park and weighing 8,000 tonnes, and it has nowhere to dump them. Oh, and they all have nuclear engines and will be radioactive for the next 150,000 years.

The MoD said last week it had made a decision to get them out of the water and store them on land. But where? A spokesman said it was "too early to speculate" but that sites would "begin to emerge" later this year.

But for Dr John Large, an expert on nuclear submarines and the man who raised the Russian Kursk sub, one site has already emerged: Harland & Wolff in Belfast.

"The MoD will be looking for a fully equipped dockyard with a big dry dock facility and a highly skilled workforce, which is why they'd look very seriously at Harland & Wolff, which has all of these elements," he said.

There is now a significant shortage of dockyards in Britain, but Belfast has the capacity because of a fall-off in shipping orders, and has the space and the heavy lifting yards.

A government spokesman last night declined to speculate on the prospect of sharing the island with 12 radioactive hulks. However, he stressed that Ireland was "an anti-nuclear country . . . the government continues to make a concerted effort to close down Sellafield and we are opposed to the nuclear industry".