Mr President, the current trade in plutonium is a consequence of the promotion of nuclear technology for both civil and military purposes. Plutonium is toxic beyond belief. Just a millionth of a gram is fatal. Toxic into time, it needs to be perfectly controlled for the next quarter of a million years. Every year a nuclear power plant operates up to 25 kilos of plutonium is created. We are asking what the European Union is doing to control plutonium within its own borders but also we have to ask why produce, why reprocess more plutonium. Why get more of this toxic material in circulation? For example, we have funded the THORP nuclear reprocessing plant in the UK at Windscale/Sellafield which will come on stream in the future. This is going to be against the European Union directives on environmental impact assessment. Every small dump has to have an environmental impact assessment. Yet we are going to increase the circulation of plutonium against even our own directives.

Now, let us look at the way the nuclear industry has flouted the law. Are we going to circulate plutonium legally within our own borders? We talk about trafficking but what about the legal circulation of plutonium. How are we going to control that? Are we going to impose the packaging directives? Are we going to impose our own rules and regulations on the nuclear industry?

Or are we going to allow this industry to flout our own laws and directives continuously and ceaselessly. I beg you to consider this question as well as the question of the control of plutonium trafficking. Because not only do we have to control the question of plutonium trafficking, we must control its manufacture and circulation within the European Union legally and illegally.

It is a very wide issue and I beg you not just to focus narrowly on illegal trafficking but to put into place structures and controls here. We are asking what is the IAEA going to do and what is the Commission going to do to control the nuclear material and enriched material? Can it be assured if the IAEA is only going to control the civil circulation, that we have a control of the military side? Can we have control of the production and can we have an inventory of all military sites within the European Union. Plutonium has been an issue for some time. In the United States the inventory of plutonium for 1976 became an issue when 8,000 lbs was found to be missing. The European Union does not even have such an inventory. It is time we controlled plutonium and it is time we had an inventory. It is time we controlled distribution and stopped production.