MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 27th March, 2020) Countries practicing discharge of nuclear waste into the sea should be held responsible for monitoring and managing the waste, Paul Holthus, president and CEO of World Ocean Council (WOC), a global business association promoting corporate ocean responsibility, told Sputnik.
"The countries that have done nuclear waste dumping should be held accountable for it and need to be responsible for it. There needs to be good data on what's out there, what's the condition of the radioactive waste and what is the likelihood that it's going to create a pollution problem, what's the risk from that pollution problem and then you get to the point of whether it needs to be taken back out of the ocean and cleaned up," Holthus said.
States responsible for disposing hazardous waste should manage it based on good risk assessment and clean it up should the risks be unacceptably high, Holthus said.
According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the practice of dumping nuclear waste in sea was terminated in the early 1990s. With the list of biggest nuclear waste dumpers featuring the United Kingdom and the United States, some of the waste discharged over the past century is still a hazard to humans and the marine ecosystem.
