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But the EC insists that its job is to enforce European pollution law without taking such "external circumstances" into account.And one senior government source admits: "There is a risk that the day of the opening ceremony could be marked by filth floating up and down the river, and fish dying all over the place."The EC's action - under its 1991 Urban Waste Water directive - has been provoked by the discharge of some 20 million tons of sewage, paper, condoms and syringes into the Thames each year from so-called "storm water overflows" which act as safety valves for the mid-19th-century sewerage system.The waste is flushed into the river some 50 or 60 times a year, killing thousands of fish, says the Environment Agency. Canoeists are officially warned to stay off the water, after some became ill and were taken to hospital.The Government's Health Protection Agency is conducting a year-long study into the health hazards. Professor Roy Playford, an expert in gastric illness at Imperial College London, has likened the state of the Thames to rivers in poor countries.Now, after complaints from angling and environmental groups, Julio Garcia Burgues, head of the EC's environmental infringements unit, has written to ministers initiating legal action. He has asked them for their "observations": if these do not satisfy Brussels, Britain could be prosecuted.Ministers have replied that they have commissioned a study of relatively small-scale improvements to sewage works and storm overflows. But they have refused to endorse the long-term solution, promoted by Thames Water - a 25-mile-long, 25ft-wide tunnel under the river to take away London's sewage. The Treasury and Ofwat, the water regulator, have opposed the £2bn tunnel on the grounds that it will drive up water rates.Last night, Peter Ainsworth, chairman of the Commons Environmental Audit Committee said: "The Government has prevaricated far too long.
Now its failure to act is imperilling the Olympics."A spokesman for London 2012 said it had "no evidence" the legal action would be relevant in deciding where the 2012 Games will be staged.. On Friday 19 April, the nation's attention was fixed on the contents of Leo Blair's lunchbox. Journalists, desperate to enliven a dull election campaign, were debating the frequency with which the Prime Minister's son was served chips at his Westminster primary school. There on the stainless steel floor of the concrete cell housing the tanks lay a huge pool of highly radioactive nuclear liquor.Altogether 83,000 litres of spent fuel dissolved in concentrated nitric acid shimmered beneath the camera lights. It contained enough plutonium to make 20 nuclear weapons.The nuclear liquor had been leaking from a badly designed pipe since at least January and possibly from as long ago as last August. The scale ranges from 0 to 7, with 7 reserved for catastrophes on the scale of Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.The last Level 3 incident in Britain (also at Sellafield) was in September 1992. There has only been one other incident as serious in the world in the past year.
The most recent Level 4 incident led to the deaths from radiation sickness of three workers in a Japanese nuclear plant in 1999. They had been mixing nuclear fuel in a bucket.Nerves were hardly calmed when the preliminary findings of a Board of Inquiry convened by the British Nuclear Group, formerly BNFL, which runs the plant, began to circulate among a small group of senior ministers and officials.The company released a copy of that report late on Friday afternoon. It makes devastating reading.The immediate cause of the leak is blamed on "metal fatigue" arising from a design fault in one of the pipes leading to a suspended tank, known as an accountancy tank. Engineers appear to have overlooked the fact that the tank would rise and fall placing "greater stresses to be exerted on associated pipework than had been anticipated".Worrying though such a fault is, it is the report's next findings that are the most shocking. "There is some evidence that the pipe may have started to fail in August 2004," it admits, adding that by January of this year "significant amounts of liquor started to be released"."In the period between January 2005 and 19 April 2005 opportunities... were missed which would have shown that material was escaping.
