MARSHALL ISLANDS: South Pacific’s Lone Nuclear Voice

By Kunda Dixit Reprint | | Print |

Kunda Dixit

SUVA, Jul 8 1995 (IPS) - Its neighbours are growing more livid as protests to stop the resumption of French underground bomb tests in the South Pacific are stepped up, but the Marshall Islands is pushing through plans to turn itself into the world’s nuclear waste dumping site.

Across the Pacific, demonstrations are being held or planned against the French nuclear tests scheduled to resume this September.

Australians and New Zealanders have been the most vocal, but the Fijians, Papua New Guineans, Tahitians and even the people of New Caledonia — a French territory — have also been noisily trying to get the French to change their minds.

At the same time, many South Pacific governments have been lobbying Japan to keep ships carrying its nuclear wastes from passing through their waters.

But in the midst of this anti-nuclear storm is the Marshall Islands, which is billing itself as an ideal storage site for nuclear trash.

“The world lacks a common dumping ground, and it would be appropriate that the Marshall Islands uses one of the uninhabitable islands to store waste from other countries alongside its own waste,” said the country’s foreign minister, Pmili Muller recently.

He added that the government was carrying out a feasibility study by international consultants before going ahead with the plan later this year.

This South Pacific country is an archipelago of about 900 atolls with a population of 55,000 people. About 3.5 hours flight west of Hawaii, the Marshall Islands is best known to the outside world as the site for 67 atmospheric tests of atom and hydrogen bombs during the 1940s and the 1950s.

The most infamous of these was the 1954 Bravo Test of a 15- kilotonne hydrogen bomb over the atoll of Bikini. Thousands of people in the Marshall Islands were contaminated when the winds shifted and fallout rained down on inhabited islands.

More than 40 years after that test, the United States is still cleaning up the beaches of the contaminated islands, where coconut water has been found to contain the radioactive Caesium 137 soaked up from the soil.

Last year, U.S. scientists declared two of the islands in Bikini safe for habitation despite earlier estimates that the tests had made the area uninhabitable for at least half a century. The scientists said their use of potassium to replace caesium had reduced radioactivity in the vegetation.

MARSHALL ISLANDS: South Pacific’s Lone Nuclear Voice

By Kunda Dixit Reprint | | Print |

Kunda Dixit

SUVA, Jul 8 1995 (IPS) - Its neighbours are growing more livid as protests to stop the resumption of French underground bomb tests in the South Pacific are stepped up, but the Marshall Islands is pushing through plans to turn itself into the world’s nuclear waste dumping site.
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