Martin Forwood of Core, a Cumbrian campaign group, claimed hundreds of kilograms of plutonium, sufficient for a large number of dirty bombs, and Liberal Democrat Steve Webb, the party’s environment spokesman, called the shipment a threat to the country’s national security.<\/p>\n
That sort of instance would be easy to police and protect, but thorough examination of every container moving through every port in the world would be a much taller, time-consuming order, calling for equipment with a degree of sophistication. That’s because not everything exhibiting radiation is necessarily a threat, since some cargoes have it naturally – and that’s a broad church, including such diverse items as bananas, roof tiles and cat litter, to mention but a few.<\/p>\n
Quite apart from concerns about what’s contained in within a cargo, and its potential to be a problem at its destination, dangerous cargoes pose threats to ships themselves. The Hyundai Fortune and Hanjin Pennsylvania were both victims of explosions; the former carrying a cargo valued at $140m, and the latter of $50m, which fell victim to an explosion involving fireworks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On the European side of the Atlantic, news that a shipment of weapons-ready plutonium was to be taken in an unarmed ship from Sellafield in Cumbria to France caused a media furore recently. The material has to be shipped because Sellafield had to call on its French competitor for help in fulfilling an order.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-6685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-container-cargo-handling"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6685"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6685\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6685"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=6685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}