In a search for potentially hundreds of thousands of barrels of nuclear waste, researchers have so far found 1,000 barrels in the Atlantic Ocean. The aim of the research is to map the impact of dumping between the 1950s and the 1980s.
At that time, dumping of nuclear waste was still allowed. Several European countries dumped more than 200,000 barrels of nuclear waste in the Atlantic Ocean. But there is no good record of where the nuclear waste was dumped and what kind of waste it was. There is concern about the effects of radioactive waste on the ecosystem on the seabed. The French study Nuclear Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring is now trying to find out.
The thousand barrels were located about 600 kilometers from the French coast in the Atlantic Ocean, reports the French National Center for Scientific Research . The international research team on the ship L’Atalante is trying to find the locations of the barrels and take samples of the soil and water in this first phase of the investigation in four weeks.
It is not yet known how much radioactivity is released from the barrels. It is also unclear what the condition of the barrels is. Later this year, in a second phase, the radioactivity and impact on the ecosystem will be analyzed.
Several European countries dumped nuclear waste between 1949 and 1982, often at depths of more than 3 kilometres. “Deep seabeds, where people thought there was no life at the time, seemed like a suitable dumping ground,” says project leader Patrick Chardon. At the time, dumping it in international waters was not yet illegal. But since then, knowledge about the ocean floor has increased and it has been discovered that there is life even kilometres deep.
The United Kingdom is said to have dumped more than 140,000 barrels underwater in those years, Belgium around 55,000 and France around 46,000. This has only been prohibited since 1993.
