Rob Edwards

Rio Tinto to be sued by uranium miner with cancer

from The Observer, 18 September 1994

The world’s largest mining company, Rio Tinto Zinc, is being sued for negligence by a cancer victim who believes he was poisoned by toxic uranium dust while working at one of the company’s mines. The legal action - the first of its kind ever taken against the British-based multinational - is likely to lead to multi-million pound claims from dozens of other uranium workers.

Lawyers acting for Edward Connelly, a 44-year-old maintenance engineer from Scotland, will tomorrow serve a writ for £400,000 damages for personal injury on RTZ’s London headquarters. The writ will allege that Connelly contracted throat cancer because the company failed to protect him from the hazards of uranium dust while he was employed at the Rössing uranium mine near Swakopmund in Namibia.

High-level waste at Sellafield 'could cause disaster'

Filed for The Guardian, 14 September 1994

The current method of storing high-level radioactive waste at Sellafield could lead to a nuclear disaster, according to one of the nuclear industry’s former senior waste managers.

Bob Burton, who worked for the UK Atomic Energy Authority and British Nuclear Fuels for 24 years, claimed that an accident at the waste store “would result in an enormous spread of radioactivity.” There is about 1,400 cubic metres of plutonium-containing liquid in 21 constantly-cooled tanks above ground at the Cumbrian plant.