English

Photo Lauri Myllyvirta. More photos on board the Happy Ranger.

Greetings from Happy Ranger, the cargo ship transporting heavy components to a flawed and failed French nuclear construction project in Finland, Olkiluoto 3.

Yesterday I and 5 other activists boarded the ship to make this the last dirty nuclear project in Finland and, if possible, in the world.

During the night, we have sailed around the southern tip of Sweden and are now heading north towards Finland.

The night on the deck of the ship can be best described by one term: 8 degree water. It was raining lightly all night and water was flowing on all the structures and making everything wet. When I was woken up for my watch at 4 am, I had a liter of water in my sleeping bag. So our concern number one is keeping each other warm for the next 40 or so hours that the trip should take.

I have now set up a mobile office in a small opening, just large enough for sitting on the floor. It is on the side of the passageway where we have our camp, on the port side of the ship.

Our action, and all the other work that Greenpeace nuclear campaign is doing around the world, is needed because the risks of nuclear power
are so easy to ignore. Much of the harm happens in remote places, far in the future or in unlikely events. Radioactive pollution makes its
contribution to cancer morbidity usually without possibility to link singular cases to the cause. We have in many countries come from one
extreme, in 1970s and 1980, when the risks of nuclear power were often exaggerated, to almost completely ignoring them.

The fact remains however, that during our lifetime we will not get to know how bad a radioactive mess we left the future generations and what the impacts will be over the course of millennia. New reactors like Olkiluoto 3 would make that mess radically worse by producing nuclear waste that is up to 10 times more hazardous than than that from existing reactors.

For me and many others, that is a sufficient reason to take action against an industry that produces 3 percent of the world’s final energy, but almost 100 percent of the world’s nuclear waste.

Lauri Myllyvirta

 
Photo Lauri Myllyvirta. More photos.

As I’m writing this more than three hours after our boarding, things have calmed down. We had most of the crew, about 15 people, around us in the beginning. We explained that we are here to protest against a dangerous and costly French nuclear experiment, not their ship or company. One crew member was quite upset about us being on board and cut a few handbanners in half with a knife, while others took pictures with their cellphones and chatted with us.

We went to meet the captain on the bridge and agreed with him that we would stay in one place on the deck and stay visible for his peace of mind, as well as not point our headlamps towards the bridge during dark hours.

Then we had one crew at a time to keep us company for some time, now we are the only people on deck. We are eating and agreeing watches for the night before we go to sleep. The temperature of the seawater is still 8 degrees celsius, so we are counting on the sea to keep us warm. And we certainly hope our action can help in putting an end to this nuclear madness and make this the last shipment of its kind.

Lauri Myllyvirta