from Sunday Herald, 11 April 2004
Depleted uranium (DU) is still contaminating the military firing range near Kirkcudbright in the south of Scotland, according to an unpublished Ministry of Defence survey.
Since 1982 over 90 shells have been misfired or malfunctioned and scattered fragments of DU, which is radioactive and chemically toxic, across the ground. Despite searches, some of the fragments have never been found and recovered.
Local concern about the risks is going to be highlighted this week, when peace activists take to the streets to hand out cards to members of the public warning that DU could make them ill. The cards are deliberately designed to mimic those handed to troops in Iraq, and revealed by the Sunday Herald in February.
Over the last 22 years over 6,500 DU rounds have been fired at the Dundrennan range, near Kirkcudbright. The shells are meant to pass through shoreline target screens and drop three kilometres out into the sea.
But the latest official report passed to the Sunday Herald says that 79 have broken up in flight, 10 have hit the ground and four hit the target gantry. The report was written by the Ministry of Defence (MoD) Radiological Protection Services at Alverstoke in Hampshire.
"Higher levels of contamination have sometimes been found at points where malfunctioning DU rounds or fragments landed on the range, but this has been removed when MoD clean-up levels were exceeded," the report states.
Other areas around firing points and targets were less contaminated, but had been fenced off "as a matter of good practice". But, the report adds: "Some projectiles and fragments have not been recovered."
The report reveals the results of the latest and most comprehensive survey of the range, carried out between September 2001 and March 2002. It shows that there are still parts of the site that remain contaminated.
"There are some isolated areas of DU contamination close to firing points and target gantries and it is recommended that any discrete fragments of DU should be removed from these areas," the report concludes.
"There are also a small number of areas where it would be advantageous to carry out further intrusive investigations to investigate some apparently anomalous monitoring results."
One of the most polluted areas was around the Raeberry firing point and target, on cliffs overlooking the Solway Firth. But there the radiation readings were confused by the discovery of a luminous radium dial in an abandoned tank. The report recommends that this should be disposed of as radioactive waste and the area resurveyed.
It adds: "Given the known history of malfunctions that have occurred at the site in the distant past, it is very encouraging that this wide-ranging survey has resulted in the discovery of a relatively small number of previously undiscovered DU fragments."
This is not, however, how it is seen by some local residents, who claim that there are high rates of leukaemia along the Solway coast. "We are not at war, but we live in a theatre of DU testing and this has the potential to cause ill health," said Chloe Bruce from the Galloway Coalition for Justice and Peace.
The coalition is planning to distribute DU health warning cards in Kirkcudbright and Castle Douglas on Friday, prior to a public meeting in the evening. The cards will be similar to those handed out by the MoD to troops on active service in Iraq.
"The focus of our action on the 16th April is to highlight the hypocrisy of the MoD issuing warning cards to our troops, but not to the civilians they supposedly protect," declared Bruce.
The MoD cards say: "You have been deployed to a theatre where depleted uranium (DU) munitions have been used. DU is a weakly radioactive heavy metal which has the potential to cause ill-health. You may have been exposed to dust containing DU during your deployment."
DU is a very hard metal produced as a waste product by the nuclear power industry. It is regarded by British and US armed forces as the best available material for armour-piercing shells, and has been extensively used in battles in Iraq and the Balkans.
The British Army's Challenger 2 tanks fire a 120-millimetre DU round. DU "has a unique battle-winning capability", says the MoD report. "At present no satisfactory alternative material exists to provide the level of penetration needed to defeat the most modern battle tanks."
A spokesman for the MoD insisted on Friday that the risks from DU contamination at the Kirkcudbright range were "minimal, to say the least". The ministry carried out a comprehensive programme of environmental monitoring at the site.
"It shows that levels of depleted uranium present a negligible risk to health," he said. "There is no reliable scientific or medical evidence to link DU with ill-health of either service personnel or the general population."
Comments