http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,2294,464674%255E1702,00.html Maralinga's radioactive scrap sold From LOUISE ROBSON of AAP 21mar00 11.00am (AEDT) RADIOACTIVE wreckage from the Maralinga nuclear test site was sold as scrap by the Australian government - none of it tested for contamination, the British officer in charge of the final stages of the clean up in the 1960s has revealed. Approximately 500 tonnes of scrap was removed from the site, freighted by rail and sold from the Department of Supply's auction site in Salisbury, north of Adelaide during the late 1960s. None of the material was ever tested for radioactive contamination, according to former flight lieutenant Sam McGee, the man in charge of the British government's 1967 clean-up mission Operation Brumby. Dented and distorted material was buried in a huge Ground Zero crater left by the bomb blast but anything intact was sent to Adelaide for sale, McGee said in a written account of his time at the base. Between 1952 and 1963, sites at Maralinga and Emu in South Australia were used for atmospheric explosions of 12 nuclear bombs and ground level explosions of plutonium, uranium and other radioactive devices. The detonations scattered contaminated fragments of metal across a 130km radius of the South Australian and Western Australian deserts. Operation Brumby was supposed to have cleaned the site before the British government handed it back. But checks in the 1980s found the sites were still contaminated and a second British-Australian STG20 million ($51.77 million) clean-up mission was completed earlier this month. McGee was the last person to leave Maralinga after the initial clean up. He supervised the burial of wreckage from the Maralinga test site and the disposal of around 500 tons of scrap from the site. "I became something like a commissioned scrap metal merchant," he recalled. "The material that had apparently not been distorted by blast power was collected and sent by rail from Watson down to Salisbury Department of Supply auction site for sale, generally as scrap metal. "The material itself consisted as far as I can remember mainly of metal cabinets, things like fridge cabinets, metal spars rather like small railway sleepers, metal work benches - it was all eventually sold as scrap. "As scrap, it would be carted away to a smelter and turned into ingots." McGee's recollections are supported by an official source. A 1967 report on the clean-up prepared for the British government's Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston by Royal Engineer Major W Cook records that one of the 10 30m towers from which the nuclear bombs were detonated was sold, and the remainder buried. The report also states that a Mustang aircraft left intact was also sold by the Department of Supply "and left on site for collection by the buyer". McGee said none of the scrap was ever tested for radioactive contamination and none of the 35 British and Australian airmen or the 100-strong British Army Pioneer Corps at the site during his tour of duty were ever supplied with radioactive monitoring devices. "It never occurred to me to issue any instructions to check materials for contamination and I did not simply because I was unaware of any risks," he wrote. "Whatever the material was, it was simply picked up out on the range, trucked to the railway loop at Watson where the airmen loaded it on to a waiting open truck wagon." A study by Australian researcher Sue Roff has established that at least seven of the men involved in Operation Brumby contracted cancer, probably from their exposure to radioactive dust. "They include Major Cook, the author of the 1967 report." Roff, based at Dundee University in Scotland, has studied the health of test veterans for the past decade. Her work has revealed high rates of cancer and other radiation related diseases among the 40,000 Australian, British and Pacific servicemen who witnessed Britain's atomic tests during the 1950s and 60s. ************************************************************************* This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
