Between 1946 and 1990, Europe sank 200,000 radioactive barrels in the Atlantic Ocean. France prepares to recover them

France will undertake this month of June a mission to map and study the state of the more than 200,000 drums with radioactive material that several European countries sank at the bottom of the sea. The objective: evaluate their environmental impact and study if it is viable to recover them.

A practice today unthinkable. For more than four decades, between 1946 and 1990, the norm for several European countries was to pour radioactive waste of very low activity in the oceanic depths.

More than 200,000 barrels loaded with gloves, laboratory materials and nuclear samples were sunk in the northeast Atlantic abyssal plains, more than 4,000 meters under the surface of the oceanan internationally prohibited custom by the 1993 London Convention.

Better late than never. Although a good part of the radioactivity has disappeared thanks to the short half-life of the CESIO-134 or iron-55 isotopes, so far there has been no state-level effort to recover them.

The National Center for Scientific Research in France (CNRS) will be launched at the middle of June With the nodssum missionwhich does not have as its immediate objective the recovery of the 200,000 barrels (a task of titanic proportions), but an exhaustive analysis of the containers, the behavior of the radionuces in the deep ocean and their interaction with the marine ecosystems to make a decision on which one to recover and how to recover them.

A robot submarine and fishing networks. The Nodssum project will take place in two major campaigns. The first phase will be a recognition mission that will sail on June 15 and will run until July 11. The protagonist will be the ULYX Submarine Autonomous Robot of the French oceanographic fleet, capable of descending up to 6,000 meters.

In its first scientific dives, Ulyx will navigate about 70 meters above the seabed to map with a high resolution Sónar the main discharge zone and identify the location of barrels. Then, it will approach up to 10 meters to photograph them. This phase also includes the initial shot of water samples, sediments and fauna, but without approaching the drums. Scientists will use nasas to capture fish and crustaceans with which to determine the effect of waste on marine life.

The barrels will not move until 2026. Taking advantage of the data collected in the first phase, the second mission will use a robot with remotely operated arms, Victor or Nautile, to directly observe the barrels and take samples around it for a more detailed analysis.

These data will be those used to determine if necessary, and feasible, selective recovery operations in the future. Security will be the axis of the entire project, which includes a robust radioprotection protocol supervised by the France Nuclear Safety Agency.

In addition to amending past errors, the mission will be a unique opportunity to measure the long -term consequences of storing at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean hundreds of thousands of radioactive waste.

Image | CNRS, Greenpeace (1978)

In Xataka | Thus, radioactive waste is “buried”: how are nuclear cemeteries inside