Filed for Evening News, 24 April 1991
Scotland has a distressing habit of mislaying its radioactivity. Millions of becquerels of it seem to be lying about all over the place.
Let me quote just a few recent examples. There was the 7.4 billion becquerel caesium 137 source that was lost during an explosion at the BP Refinery in Grangemouth in March 1987. Despite intensive searches it has never been found and is presumed missing on the mud flats.
Last year Marconi Command and Control Systems in Fife admitted in court to discharging 3.7 billion becquerels of nickel 63 into storm drains over two days. This was ten times the legal limit for a month.
A month ago the Scottish Office was accused by a leading radiation expert, Professor Murdoch Baxter, of ignoring the risk of pollution by radon gas being faced by residents of the Red Fox housing estate in Balloch on Loch Lomond. The estate was built next to a former factory site which is contaminated with radioactive hotspots.
All these incidents - and the many others I could recount - are worrying. But none seem as alarming as the latest radiation scare - the radium that has been poisoning Dalgety Bay.
During World War Two there was a military base at Donibristle to the west of the bay known as HMS Merlin. When it was shut down between 40 and 45 years ago, a host of old aircraft and equipment were broken up, burnt and dumped there.
The trouble is that most of the aircraft contained significant amounts of radium 226 in their dials and communications equipment. It was in the luminous paint designed to ensure that control panels could be understood at night.
The radium was forgotten until nearly a year ago when a training squad from Babcock Thorn, the company that now runs Rosyth dockyard, happened to be practising radiation monitoring around Dalgety Bay. To their surprise they discovered some radiation hotspots which they reported to Dunfermline District Council.
The council asked an independent radiation consultant, Dr Bob Wheaton, to conduct a survey which also found contamination. The government’s National Radiological Protection Board and Her Majesty’s Industrial Pollution Inspectorate were then called in.
Up to last autumn the NRPB conducted at least three surveys variously reported to have discovered between 80 and 200 hotspots. It produced a report recommending that yet another survey should be carried out because of the possibility that there were still undetected lumps of radium buried about the place.
Unfortunately this has been delayed because of disagreement over who should fund it. The district council does not think that its poll-tax payers should fork out to help solve a problem created by the Ministry of Defence. The MoD has been dragging its feet, though under pressure now seems willing to come up with some cash.
Although the NRPB has verbally reported its findings to the district council, it has not so far made its written report available (it is planning to do so at its next meeting with the council on 30 April). Information on the precise extent of the pollution and on the levels of radioactivity involved is hence frustratingly sparse.
Nevertheless, in response to a concerned letter from the local MP, Gordon Brown, last week, the Scottish Office Environment Minister, Lord James Douglas-Hamilton MP, has been quick to offer the ritual reassurances. All the contamination found has been removed, he says and “there is no radiation danger to members of the public visiting the area”.
The real question of course is not those who visit the area, but those who live there, and who have lived there for the decades radium 226 has been lying around unnoticed. We know that radium, even in the minutest amounts, can cause cancer.
We know it killed the woman who helped discover radioactivity, Marie Curie, as well as hundreds of early radiation workers. We know that there is an excess of childhood leukaemias in the area around Dalgety Bay.
We now need to know a helluva lot more before we can take any comfort from the weasel words of the good Lord James.