Expert - 'No incinerator design can remove dangerous nanoparticles"

There is no safe level of exposure to fine particulate air pollution, University of Ulster professor, Vyvyan Howard, told the College Proteins oral hearing last week. The toxicological research academic claimed evidence was emerging that no current incinerator design sufficiently abated dangerous nanoparticles from potential emissions that would emerge from the proposed Nobber plant, and recent European studies pointed to such emissions as a source for between three to six per cent of deaths in larger urban centres. The lungs and blood/brain barrier had been shown to be the routes these nanoparticles could penetrate, all of them man-made chemicals which human evolution gave our normal defence mechanisms no history of tackling, said the Coleraine professor. There were findings to suggest they caused protein misfolding, making them toxic. The potential for such defective proteins contributing to the onset of Alzheimer"s Disease was the basis of the EU grant of €2.5 million his group was currently researching, he added. The body burden of such man-made particulates was already too high, particularly in the high-fat diets of those living closest to the North Pole, who were already shown to have the highest levels. The Stockholm Convention had already brought about some reductions in these levels but recent Dutch studies pointed to breastfed babies suffering up to a four-point loss on the IQ scale due to higher exposure to such dioxins and furans, he said. Prof Howard queried the long-term fate of such materials in stored fly ash in the proposed incinerator, since there was currently very few findings on landfill outcomes. Mullagh parent Amanda Govern and Mullaghlands county councillor Shane O"Reilly expressed the opposition of their village, located eight miles from the proposed site, to the Nobber project. Their concerns were principally health, she said, but the food production status of the district as well as the trend of the more affluent to move out of an area where an incinerator was sited would harm the long-term economic prospects of the area. Cllr O"Reilly said his concerns centred on contamination, the effects on the farming community, devaluation of properties and health concerns. GMIT lecturer Dr Angela Ryan told the hearing the national interest would not be served by the incinerator processing MBM. College Proteins currently caused 0.2 per cent of the country"s carbon footprint by producing 38,492 tonnes annually. The claim of a stable Category One MBM supply was doubtful, since BSE disease was disappearing and there were now technologies to tackle such problems as the corrosive sodium hydroxide byproduct. More US findings pointed to the role of fine and ultrafine particle emissions to cardiovascular and lung disease, as well as 'highly significant' effects of hormone and reproduction disruption. She criticised the dioxin concentration claims of Ds Schrenk and Callaghan, for College Proteins, as flawed and 'totally inadequate'.