Leading Article: Dumping policy is all at sea

BELIEVE it or not, the Government does have the beginnings of a scientific case for wanting to allow the dumping of nuclear waste at sea to continue. The world's oceans contain 9bn tonnes of uranium, and smaller quantities of other radioactive materials.

By comparison with what is already there, the quantities of radioactive material that might be dumped would not be large. The materials would certainly be far removed from people. And with luck, their radioactivity would seep out slowly enough not to cause harm.

Such was the argument deployed by the British delegation at an international conference on the subject in London last week. Only four other countries took the same line. Three of them - France, Belgium and China - have less than shining records in their behaviour towards the environment. The fourth, Russia, simply cannot afford anything but the cheapest method of disposing of its copious quantities of nuclear waste.

Against Britain were 37 other countries, including the United States and Japan, who agreed to extend the existing moratorium on dumping nuclear waste in the sea into a permanent ban. In the past, many of these countries treated the natural world as an infinite purification system, able to swallow, cleanse and recycle whatever noxious substances they were too lazy to dispose of responsibly.

Thankfully they no longer make this mistake. The hole in the ozone layer and the poisoning of millions of creatures by the use of DDT have taught them to accept limits on their behaviour.

Britain must now decide whether to opt out of the convention, or accept the majority view and abandon, for instance, any plans to scuttle its decommissioned, but still dangerously radioactive, nuclear submarines in the middle of the Atlantic or the North Sea. The Government would be wise to accept the ban. One good reason for doing so is that a unanimous convention would help to encourage an approach in future in which prudence takes priority over optimistic minority scientific opinions.

But prudence offers another reason for signing the convention. The bottom of the ocean is probably the least accessible part of the Earth. Barrels of nuclear waste can always be exhumed from land and taken out to sea if future research offers convincing arguments for doing so. But if we dump our nuclear waste under the sea and then think better of it, we may not have the luxury of changing our minds.