More than 1,000 barrels of nuclear waste in the Atlantic

2025-06-29 08:53:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

Nuclear waste has been dumped into the Atlantic for decades. Now the first of hundreds of thousands of barrels thought to be on the seabed has been found. Little is known about their condition.

In their search for nuclear waste dumped decades ago, researchers have now discovered and located more than 1,000 barrels in the northeastern Atlantic, according to a spokeswoman for the French research organization CNRS. The international search team set off from Brest, western France, in mid-June aboard the ship "L'Atalante" for the research area in the Western European Atlantic basin. For four weeks they have been searching for the barrels of nuclear waste to assess their impact on the local ecosystem.

Between the 1950s and 1980s, several countries simply dumped nuclear waste into the ocean. At the time, the ocean depths seemed like a convenient and simple solution for disposing of nuclear waste generated by industrial development and laboratories - at least where the ocean was considered geologically stable.

It was only in 1993 that the dumping of nuclear waste into the ocean was finally banned. It is believed that at least 200,000 such barrels are found in the Northeast Atlantic alone - at a depth of 3,000 to 5,000 meters. However, the exact location of the nuclear waste is unknown. Little is also known about the condition of the barrels and whether they are located individually or in groups.

Researchers are investigating the impact on the environment

Researchers are currently exploring the area where half of the debris may have fallen. The team aims to create a map of the nuclear waste barrels found and take numerous samples from the water, seabed and animals. In this expedition they are supported by the autonomous diving robot Ulysx, which is equipped, among other things, with a camera for 3D imaging and a sound system for finding objects.

Patrick Chardon, head of the NODSSUM-Nuclear Ocean Dump Site Survey Monitoring project, believes that the radioactivity in the vast majority of nuclear waste in the North Atlantic will have practically disappeared after about 300 to 400 years. The barrels were designed to withstand the pressure of the deep ocean, but not to actually contain the radioactivity. Chardon suspects that the radioactivity may have leaked out of the containers long ago./ DW