An international team of researchers wants to investigate nuclear waste vessels that slumber at the Atlantic Ocean for decades. In the middle of your mission you have already detected 1,000 copies. Because the containers are not built that they lock radioactivity, an impact on the ecosystem is feared.
The international research team of the CNRS organization broke out in mid -June from the Western French Brest with its ship “L’Atalante” to its search area in Western European Polish of the Atlantic Ocean. For four weeks they want to search for vessels of nuclear waste 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 barrels of nuclear waste landed in the ocean years ago
Between the 1950s and 1980s, a number of states removed nuclear waste in the ocean. The depths of the ocean, far from the coast and human activity, appeared as a cheap and simple solution to remove what started in industrial development and in laboratories – at least where the ocean was considered geologically stable.
At that time there was little of life in the oceans of the world. It was only in 1993 that the removal of nuclear waste in the ocean was finally forbidden. In the northeastern Atlantic Ocean alone, at least 200,000 barrels is suspected – at 3000 to 5000 meters.
Experts want to make cards with barrels
But it is not known exactly where the nuclear waste is. You don’t know much about the condition of the barrels and whether they are individual or in groups. That is why there are currently 21 researchers in the area in which half of the waste landed.
The team wants to make a map with nuclear barrel find and take various samples of water, soil and animals. You will receive support from the autonomous diving robot Ulyx, which has a camera for 3D images and a sonar system to find sound objects.
Patrick Chardon, head of the Nowsssum project (Nuclear Ocean Dump site Survey monitoring), assumes that most of the nuclear waste in the North -Atlantic Ocean should have disappeared after about 300 to 400 years of radioactivity. However, the barrels are designed in such a way that they resist the depth pressure, but not so in a way that they really lock the radioactivity. The atomic physicist suspects that radioactivity could escape from the containers for a long time.
Source: Krone
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