Part 3 of 3 Parts (Please read Parts 1 and 2 first)
     Deere-Jones warns that the NWS has produced an “inadequate and inaccurate impact assessment” on the effects of the airgun surveys on marine species present in these regional Marine Conservation Zones. He adds, “My recommendation is that consideration of the proposed survey, and all such surveys in UK waters, should be postponed until the information gaps referenced by Professor Popper have been filled and properly informed impact assessment decisions can be made.”
     The RFL report concludes with the recommendation that suitable alternative to airgun seismic survey, which pose a lesser threat to marine life, should be considered.
     U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has put nuclear power at the heart of the country’s new energy strategy. There are currently plans to build up to eight new nuclear power reactors in the country. However, as yet, no permanent and safe storage method has been devised for spent nuclear fuel. It remains hazardous for many thousands of years and threatens human health and the environment. Two hundred and fifty thousand tons of this waste is currently in temporary storage around the world.
      The U.K. government favors deep geological disposal to deal with the most radioactive waste, whether deep below the ground or deep beneath the seabed. However, there are still many concerns about this sixty-five-billion-dollar facility proposed for in the Irish Sea, which has not been tried or tested and provides no guarantee of safety.
      The U.K. has used the seabed of the English Channel for disposal of radioactive waste. A German newspaper reported in April of 2013 that a team of journalists had discovered barrels of radioactive waste a few miles from the French coast just north of the island of Alderney in an underwater valley known as Hurd’s deep according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Britain and Belgium dumped twenty-eight thousand five hundred barrels of nuclear waste into the English Channel between 1950 and 1963. In 1963, the British Radioactive Substances Act of 1960 went into effect and the dumping stopped.
       The existence of the barrels of radioactive waste was not a secret. Experts had assumed that the containers would have rusted open years ago. This would allow the nuclear material to dissipate in seawater to harmless concentrations. However, photos from an unmanned submarine showed that some of the barrels at four hundred feet were still intact. This prompted German environmentalists to call for their removal from the Channel. It is estimated that there are more intact barrels.
      The barrels contain an estimated seventeen thousand tons of low-level radioactive waste. Sylvia Kotting-Uhl is a German Green Party parliamentarian and nuclear policy spokesperson. She said, “I believe that at such shallow depths these barrels pose a high potential for danger. And it’s not for nothing that dumping in the ocean has been forbidden for 20 years.”
      Hartmut Nies is a German oceanic expert for the IAEA. He said that “If it’s not too complex, then of course they should be removed.”
     In response to a parliamentary inquiry from the Green Party in August 2012, entitled “Final Disposal Site Ocean Floor,” the German federal government stated: “The Federal Maritime and Hydrographic Agency (BSH), as part of its radioactivity monitoring in the North Sea, regularly carries out monitoring runs, which went into the British Channel Most recently in August 2009. The monitoring data contained no indication of emissions from dumping areas.”