Boat Sideswiped, Greenpeace Says

Environmentalists said a Japanese escort ship rammed a Greenpeace boat that was tracking a freighter laden with highly toxic plutonium Sunday.

Japan is shipping the plutonium home to fire up a new generation of nuclear reactors. Greenpeace opposes the shipment and is tracking it, saying the plutonium could leak or fall into terrorists’ hands.

The freighter Akatsuki Maru, carrying 1.7 tons of plutonium, sailed out of the French port of Cherbourg late Saturday after a day of clashes between security forces and environmentalists.

The vessel’s route on its two-month voyage to Yokohama is secret. But Greenpeace said the freighter and its armed escort, a Japanese warship, were sailing southwest in the Atlantic and could reach Portugal’s Azores Islands by Wednesday.

The sideswipe collision in the English Channel damaged the helicopter landing decks of the warship Shikishima and the Greenpeace boat Solo, the group said. There were no injuries.

“Those guys are pirates. It’s unbelievable,” said Greenpeace spokesman Eloi Glorieux, contacted by radio from Paris. “They rammed into us from the port side.”

Japanese officials in Tokyo refused to comment.

France, a leader in nuclear technology, treats fuel for several countries. The Akatsuki Maru’s plutonium was extracted from spent Japanese reactor fuel at a plant near Cherbourg run by France’s state-owned nuclear-fuel processing agency, COGEMA. The shipment is the first of 30 tons to be shipped back to Japan this decade under a $4-billion contract.

A tiny amount of plutonium inhaled can kill a human. It is also the key ingredient in nuclear weapons. Although France insists the shipment is not weapons-quality, Greenpeace says it could be used to make 120 crude bombs.