AN EXPERIMENT designed to discover the fate of 28 tonnes of depleted uranium
in shells fired into the sea off south-west Scotland has gone disastrously
wrong. Military scientists have lost DU samples they placed on the seabed to see
if the original shells might have corroded, leaching the dense, radioactive
metal into the sea.
Last year, the British government鈥檚 Defence Evaluation and Research Agency
(DERA) put 90 small cylinders of DU on the seabed of the Solway Firth. But last
month they went missing after severe storms buffeted the region.
The experiment was a response to public concern about the dangers of 6900 DU
shells fired into the Firth from tanks on the Dundrennan army range near
Kirkcudbright over the past 20 years. Despite searches, scientists found no
trace of these shells, though a fisherman dredged one up by accident in
1997.
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To try and find out what had happened to the shells, DERA intended to
retrieve its DU samples for analysis from time to time. But when divers tried to
do this in early February, the samples had gone. The seabed rig holding 66 of
the cylinders was badly damaged, while another 24 cylinders that had been buried
in the silt could not be traced.
Divers from the Faslane nuclear submarine base on the Clyde are due to start
hunting for the missing DU samples next week. The samples are 鈥渁 negligible
addition鈥� to the DU shells already on the seabed, a DERA spokeswoman says. DERA
scientists believe DU in the sea forms an insoluble sludge of hydrated uranium
oxide which is dispersed by underwater currents.
But the Scottish Environment Protection Agency points out that without the
evidence it鈥檚 impossible to be sure. 鈥淎t present we are unable to provide proper
public reassurance,鈥� says the agency鈥檚 chairman, Ken Collins. Environmentalists
fear that the shells could break up and be washed ashore on beaches in storms.