THERE are fears that Cumbria's multi million pound shellfish industry could be under threat because of proposed international safety limits on radioactivity levels in food.

Thousands of tonnes of British shellfish presently eaten abroad could be banned if the guidelines become UK law.

The Food Standards Agency has warned that lobsters, cockles and scallops from the area of coast around the Sellafield nuclear reactor, which includes Morecambe Bay, have been found to be so polluted with plutonium that they breach new limits imposed by the UN.

The new limits have been proposed by the UN's Codex Alimentarius Commission, which brings together the World Health Organisation and the Food and Agriculture Organisation and will shortly be discussed among UN member states.

The proposals aim to cut the long-term risk of cancer from raioactive substances in food to below one in a million and suggest a safety limit of plutonium in food of up to one becquerel per kilogram. However, shellfish sampled by the Food Standards Agency from the area between the Ribble Estuary at Preston and Kirkcudbright on the North Solway Coast in 2002 exceeded this limit. Winkles from St Bees, next to Sellafield, contained 66 bequerals per kilogram.

Lancashire county councillor David Wood, who is a member of a fisheries working group, called the results "extremely worrying" and said that he would welcome the guidelines as a way of "allaying the public's fears."

But the FSA sees the new limits as "not proportionate to the actual risk." The proposed limits have also angered fishermen who fear that they could bring the multi million pound shellfish industry to its knees.

Janet Butler, owner of Newbiggin Shellfish, which operates in the Morecambe Bay area, said the regulations would spell "bankruptcy" for the fishermen who had worked the coast for generations. "It would finish us, where would we go from there?" she asked. "If there is that much plutonium here, why isn't the wildlife dying off."

She added that the Government should seek to introduce laws, regulating the way cockle pickers operated in the Bay before considering the UN guidelines.

"We are having a hard enough time as it is, the little fishermen are being shoved around. Why don't they protect our own doorstep first? All we are trying to do is secure our livelihoods," she said.

Spokesman for British Nuclear Fuels at Sellafield Jamie Reed said that an FSA report in 2003 found that even the people eating large quantities of sea food caught in the Sellafield area were receiving less than the maximum annual radiation dose limit.

"BNFL is committed to reducing discharges and, in the last 15 years, has invested more than £2 billion in waste management and effluent clean-up at Sellafield. In particular discharges of plutonium, americium and caesium in liquid effluent from clean-up plants have been totally eliminated," he said.