In their search for nuclear waste, more than 1,000 barrels in the Northeast Atlantic have discovered and located more than 1,000 barrels in their search for decades ago. This was announced by a spokeswoman for the French research organization CNRS. The international research team broke up in mid -June from the Western French Brest with her ship “L’Astalante” to her search area in Western European pools of the Atlantic.
For four weeks they want to search for nuclear waste barrels and see what influence they have on the local ecosystem. There is also a researcher from the Thünen Institute for Fishing Ecology in Bremerhaven.
Hundreds of thousands of nuclear waste barrels landed in the ocean years ago
Between the 1950s and 1980s, a number of states have disposed of nuclear waste in the ocean. The depths of the ocean, which were far from the coast and human activity, appeared as a cheap and simple solution to dispose of what started in industrial development and in laboratories – at least where the ocean was considered geologically stable.
At that time there was little knew about life in the world’s oceans. It was not until 1993 that the disposal of nuclear waste in the ocean was finally prohibited. At least 200,000 barrels are suspected in Northeast Atlantic alone- at 3,000 to 5,000 meters.
Experts want to create card with barrels
But exactly where the nuclear waste is located is not known. You don’t know much about the condition of the tons and whether they are individually or in groups. There are therefore currently 21 researchers in the area in which half of the waste landed.
The team wants to create a card with nuclear barrel finds and take several samples of water, soil and animals. You get support from the autonomous diving robot Ulyx, which has a camera for 3D images and a sonar system to locate objects with sound.
Patrick Chardon, head of the Nodssum project (Nuclear Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring), assumes that most of the nuclear waste in the North Atlantic should have disappeared radioactivity after about 300 to 400 years. However, the barrels were designed in such a way that they withstand the pressure of depth, but not in such a way that they really lock the radioactivity. The atomic physicist suspects that radioactivity could escape from the containers for a long time.
