from Sunday Herald, 25 February 2001
Defence ministers have misled the House of Commons over the arrangements for regulating the firing of depleted uranium (DU) shells at an army range in south west Scotland, the Sunday Herald can reveal. The misrepresentations have angered MPs, who accused ministers of trying to create a false impression of the safety of DU.
The Defence Secretary, Geoff Hoon, has wrongly said that the use of DU at the Dundrennan range near Kirkcudbright is governed by radioactive waste legislation. While the Armed Forces Minister, John Spellar, has argued that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) has "oversight" of the DU firing programme, when in fact it does not.
These statements have annoyed SEPA, which says that its inability to regulate the MoD "has been gnawing away at the heart of environmental policy for years". Senior officials say that if the agency had been asked to authorise the MoD's plan to dump 28 tonnes of DU from Dundrennan into the Solway Firth, it would have rejected it.
A major investigation by the Sunday Herald has unearthed a catalogue of other blunders at Dundrennan, including radioactive contamination of the site in breach of safety limits, the loss of DU shells on land and at sea, and an embarrassing fiasco earlier this month in which 90 samples of DU went missing during a seabed experiment. Of the 6,900 DU shells fired into the sea since 1982, the only one ever recovered was accidentally dredged up by a local fisherman in 1997.
"Statutory regulations govern the use of DU on ranges in the UK", Hoon told MPs
in a written parliamentary answer on 15 January. "These are the Radioactive Substances Act 1993, which controls radioactive waste discharges to the environment, and the Ionising Radiations Regulations 1999."
But SEPA said that because the MoD has crown immunity, the firing of DU shells at Dundrennan is "exempt from regulation" under the 1993 Act. SEPA is informed of activities there and given monitoring reports by the MoD out of courtesy, but it does not regulate the firing programme or conduct any monitoring itself.
"I believe that the MOD should not be exempt from regulation under the 1993 Act," said SEPA's chairman, Ken Collins. "In fact, I believe that this issue has been gnawing away at the heart of environmental policy for years. I don't think there's an environmental body anywhere which wouldn't welcome the removal of exemption."
The Defence Evaluation and Research Agency, which carries out the DU firing at Dundrennan for the MoD, admitted last week that SEPA was "technically correct". But a spokeswoman added: "The MoD has publicly declared that they will put in place the procedures and precautions necessary, which are at least equivalent to the statutory regulations."
In a statement to the House of Commons on 9 January, Spellar said that the Environment Agency in England and SEPA "have oversight of the firing programme". SEPA again insisted that this was wrong because it has no legal control over MoD activities at Dundrennan.
An MoD spokesman accepted last week that the minister had made a mistake. "'Oversight' is probably the wrong word," he said. "'Sight' would have been better."
But Alisdair Morgan, the SNP MP and MSP for Galloway and Upper Nithsdale, accused ministers of being deliberately misleading. "They are obviously trying to give the impression that they are regulated by much stricter controls than is actually the case," he said.
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