People, as Lou Reed once groused (as if he ever did anything else), will “shit in a river, dump battery acid in a stream. They’ll watch dead rats wash up on the beach, complain if they can’t swim.”
Despite the Rock’n’Roll Frankenstein’s terminal misanthropy, he had a point. For decades, we treated the oceans as a kind of vast garbage dump, including for radioactive waste. Now, scientists are trying to discover what’s happened to it in the 30 years since.
Between 1946 and 1990, over 200,000 barrels of radioactive waste were deliberately sunk into the Atlantic by various nations, including France. Packed in bitumen or cement, the containers were lowered into what scientists at the time considered to be lifeless zones, thousands of meters below the ocean surface and far from any coastline.
The practice was permitted until 1990, when it was banned under the London Convention following growing awareness of deep-sea ecosystems and the potential environmental risks of radioactive leakage. The barrels were never retrieved, and no comprehensive effort has since been made to assess their state – or their potential impact on marine life.
As we now know, even the deepest abysses of the ocean teem with life. So, what’s going on with all those radioactive barrels down there? Nobody knows. In the next few months, a team of French scientists will try and find out.
The mission, called Nodssum, is a collaboration involving CNRS, Ifremer, and the French Oceanographic Fleet. Their immediate goal is to map a 6,000-square-kilometer section of the seafloor where a significant number of barrels are believed to be resting.
Note that: believed to be. Because, just like the Titanic pre-1985, they could be anywhere in a thousands-of-miles radius of where they sunk.
To locate them, the team will deploy a high-resolution sonar system and the autonomous submersible UlyX, one of the few underwater vehicles capable of operating at depths greater than 4,000 meters. UlyX will scan the ocean bottom, helping to establish the precise location of the containers and assess their current condition.
And what effect, if any, they’re having on the abyssal ecology.
So far, the environmental effects of the submerged barrels remain unknown. As the article notes, “no one knows what impact the dumping of these barrels may have had on deep-sea ecosystems, or whether they still represent a radiological risk.” Part of the challenge lies in the vastness and inaccessibility of the ocean floor where the barrels were dropped.
Once the mapping phase is complete, a second campaign will be launched to collect samples of sediments, seawater, and marine organisms near the barrels. These samples will help determine whether radioactive materials have begun to escape their containers and what effect, if any, that may be having on surrounding ecosystems […]
The researchers hope that the project will provide new insights into the long-term stability of radioactive waste in deep-sea environments and offer a clearer understanding of how past nuclear policies continue to shape today’s oceans.
I’ve seen enough Godzilla movies to know how this is going to turn out.
