In brief

Issue 

In brief

By Barry Healy

BP backs off

Energy conglomerate British Petroleum has backed off from legal attempts to seize the bank accounts of UK Greenpeace. On August 21, BP dropped court actions against Greenpeace for its campaign against oil drilling off the north-west coast of Scotland. The following day, BP dropped proceedings against Jon Castle, the captain of the protest vessel MV Greenpeace.

"Public support has led BP to back down", Chris Rose, deputy executive director of Greenpeace, said. "They should now stop oil exploration in the Atlantic."

Atlantic radioactive waste

The governments of Ireland and Denmark presented a recommendation to stop radioactive discharges into the marine environment at the meeting of the intergovernmental OSPAR Commission (the organisation that regulates marine pollution in the north-east Atlantic) in Brussels earlier this month.

The proposal comes after months of controversy over the health and environmental impact of radioactive discharges from the plutonium reprocessing facilities at La Hague (France) and Sellafield (England). In June, Greenpeace sampling of the liquid waste from the La Hague discharge pipe discovered that the seabed around the pipe had become radioactive.

Further revelations in July led the French government to close off the area around the pipe to all maritime activities. In early August, research revealed that plutonium discharged from the Sellafield plant had been detected in thousands of teeth from children in Britain.

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