Pollution from the proposed Newhaven incinerator will be worse than the polonium 210 that killed Alexander Litvinenko, it has been claimed.

Retired GP Dr Dick Van Steenis joined Lewes MP Norman Baker last night at a meeting for protesters fighting the 14,000 square metre facility due to open in 2010.

Dr Van Steenis, who has advised four parliamentary enquiries on pollution and the environment, said particles emitted from the controversial plant would be "worse than plutonium" and "worse than polonium 210."

Mr Litvinenko, a former Russian security agent, died in November in London after he was infected with polonium 210, a radioactive poison.

Mr Baker, who opened the speeches, described the waste local plan, which sited the plant in Newhaven, as a disgrace.

Dr Van Steenis said microscopic poisonous particles that enter the lungs and the body would create a 15-mile fallout zone around Newhaven.

This unregulated pollution, he said, would cause asthma at first then, as exposure continued, birth defects, infant mortality, heart attacks, cancers, strokes and diabetes.

He said: "For 15 miles around Newhaven prevailing winds would mean an arc of pollution poisoning that would affect Lewes badly, Brighton, Peacehaven, Hailsham and Eastbourne.

"A vast population would cop it more than one or two days a week."

Dr Steenis is compiling a report for the Dump the Dump campaign that will be passed on to local councils.

Mr Baker pledged to look at his evidence and take it to the Department for Health.

He claimed Newhaven had been chosen for the incinerator because it was less attractive than other areas of Sussex.

He added: "The waste local plan consultation was a stitch up between officers from East Sussex County Council and Brighton and Hove City Council who had decided, "We must have an incinerator in Newhaven" on day one.

"They said bung it down in Newhaven because people in Newhaven don't count very much.

"And now the last thing they will want to do is minimise waste because it will affect their contract.

"There are councils in the country that are now being fined for not providing enough waste."

Council reports had failed to measure pollution at the level they should have, Doctor Van Steenis said, unlike in America where legislation was brought in 20 years ago to stop the killer industrial particles being emitted.

He said: "There is no protection for you in the UK. In America they woke up. They realised pollution was killing people and they realised it was these levels."

Jane Wilde, of the East London Community Recycling Partnership, also spoke at the meeting at the Brighthelm Centre in Brighton.

She runs a scheme were compost from food waste is being collected door to door to minimise waste.

She said: "Yes Brighton, there is an alternative."