Australia's worst dust storm in 70 years just got worse

From September 22 to 24, 2009, Australia's worst dust storm in 70 years carried debris from the continent's interior into the coastal cities, including Sydney, and onwards, on Sept. 24-25, to New Zealand.  The storm was about 1,000 km long and 500 km wide.  A second dust storm hit Syndey early on September 25 and Brisbane by evening of September 26 - it was smaller than the first storm and measured about 200 km wide.  The winds from both storms may have carried plutonium particles¹ and there were speculations in the blogosphere that even other radioactive substances, like uranium from open mines and DU from military operations, were lofted from the interior.   An article by news.com.au on Sept. 25 titled 'Are the dust storms radioactive? Australian scientists study Aussie dust from New Zealand' mentioned that a team of scientists had assembled to determine if uranium dust from South Australia's massive Olympic Dam uranium mine might have ended up in the red dust that coated the Australian east coast and New Zealand.  (Filmmaker David Bradbury told the Coober Pedy Regional Times on Sept. 25 that the red dust from the storms likely contained plutonium from the Maralinga test site and uranium dust and radon from BHP Bilton's Olympic Dam, which is currently planning to expand into an open-cut mine larger than Adelaide, which Bradbury says 'will be one of the, if not THE most environmentally criminal act of any mining company in the history of Australia.')

What is Maralinga?  How did plutonium get there?  

In the 1950s and 1960s, Australia was the host of a handful of U.K.-sponsored atmospheric nuclear tests and related nuclear experiments on the Montel Bello Islands (off the northwest coast) and at Emu Field and Maralinga, both located in the Great Victoria Desert in South Australia.  At Maralinga² between 1957 and 1963, the U.K. conducted several plutonium dispersal experiments, dubbed 'minor trials' (very similar to the ones conducted at the Nevada Test Site; see: safety experiments), which scattered radioactivity (tens of pounds of Plutonium 239) far and wide into the bush.   

Through the 1990s, the Emu and Maralinga sites were physically blocked off by a 100-mile radius security zone, which might have been a good enough barrier for un-remediated (not cleaned up) nuclear sites but in reality is no match for a dust storm the size of several hurricanes. (If the same sized-radius were blocked off around the Nevada Test Site, it would force the evacuation of Las Vegas.)  

Although the 'Maralinga Rehabilitation Project' - finished in 2000 - cleaned up some of the 'minor trial' plutonium, not all of the plutonium is cleaned up and the waste burial practices have been SERIOUSLY³ called into question mostly because the plutonium was buried only 3 to 4 meters deep.  Australia's Senator Lyn Allison noted in 2003: "No matter how many reports are produced, the fact of the matter is that 22kg of plutonium is buried in simple, unlined earth trenches, some of it just a couple of metres below the surface."  The Sunday Age article titled "Agenda - Maralinga's Afterlife" on May 11, 2003, stated that: 'The vitrification method was abandoned by MARTAC three-quarters of the way through the project, in favour of the much cheaper trench-method. Most of the waste - including broken-up vitrified material - was then buried in unlined pits covered with just three metres of clean soil. The rest was left on the desert surface. As a result, an area the size of metropolitan London - 300 square kilometres - remains infected with lethal plutonium that will stay active for a quarter of a million years.'   That section of land is dubbed the 'North West Plume,' located northwest of Taranaki and contaminated largely from the 'Vixen B' trials (see footnote 2).

On December 30, 2008, Australians learned that thousands of square kilometers of the ocean also became the repository for some of the Maralinga plutonium.  The expiration of a '30-year rule' of secret Cabinet government documents in late 2008 revealed information that plutonium cleaned off the desert floor in the late 1970s at Maralinga by the British cleanup operation had 'probably' been dumped in the ocean!  The Australian government kept mum on the issue and location of Britain's secret final resting place - the ocean - as part of a 1978 'plea bargain' over cleanup issues.   All told, the British took about 0.5 kilograms of plutonium and 20 kilograms of debris-mixed radioactive waste into the seas.  (Engines from air force bombers that flew through the nuclear test radioactive clouds - and later dismantled - also were dumped in the oceans.) 

Australian authorities have denied there is any radiological health problem with the red dust:  The Australian wrote in their September 26 article titled 'You call that a dust storm..?' that the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) told them regarding the first dust storm 'that health problems from the Maralinga dust specifically were not expected, though the Bureau of Meteorology said those grains would have carried across to Sydney.'  ARPANSA acting chief executive Peter Burns noted:  'The dilution between that dust and all other dust is such that any radioactive material would be pretty small compared to the total volume. Generally, even right there (at Maralinga) in a dust storm, you don't pick up enough dust to cause serious problems.'  

Although it is commendable that ARPANSA acknowledged that radioactive material was in the red dust that coated most of the populated areas in Australia and New Zealand, ARPANSA's Burns is saying more to allay fears than educating Australians about the consequences of their actual radiation exposure to the dust.

Even if the winds significantly diluted and reduced the concentration of the Maralinga soil-laden plutonium in the red-dusty air, it will still be extremely toxic because it takes just one millionth of a gram of plutonium to deliver a lethal dose and even more minute quantities (billionths of a gram) might induce cancer.   Theoretically, even a single atom (particle) of plutonium has the ability, from its extremely strong alpha radiation (like a very strong, mini X-ray machine), to produce free radicals and alter DNA in our body's cells - both are precursors to cancerous growth.  

Since any population exposure to radiation increases the risk of cancer in a population, the dispersion of plutonium dust from Maralinga over thousands of miles of populated Australia has increased Aussie's cancer burden.  To what extent can be determined by how much dust entered water and food supplies, and also directly into human bodies, and the population's collective immunological strength.

The hand of plutonium from the red dust can reach all corners of the world.   If Australian vintage 2009 wine has a uniquely metallic odor, then it might be from the radioactive dust that coated wine grapes.  Then, the bioaccumulation of plutonium traveling (and concentrating) up the food chain in late 2009 from plankton to humans (eating Pacific Rim seafood) might trigger a wave of new cancers.

Finally, ARPANSA's Burns commented that even a dust storm won't pick up enough radioactive dust to cause problems, yet the winds from the first dust storm reached speeds of over 100 km per hour (62 mph) (Reuters noted on 9.23.09: 'A severe thunderstorm with 100 km per hour (60 miles per hour) plus winds formed in South Australia state on Monday and began whipping up dust from drought-hit outback lands.')  Richard Miller, who has studied fallout patterns from U.S. nuclear testing, noted on his personal blog that at the Nevada Test Site radioactive soils can be relocated up to 5 miles at wind speeds of less than 50 miles per hour (80 km/hr).  Wind speeds over 50 mph (80km/hr) can send radioactive dust just about anywhere, and certainly the wind-speeds in South Australia met that criteria.   The climate at Maralinga is such that gusts during dust storms, based on recordings made during 12 days of dust storm activity from 1957 to 1966, can range from 90km/h to 125km/h.   (p. 6, 'Rehabilitation of the former nuclear test sites at Emu and Maralinga (Australia) 2003).

Apparently, winds of just 40 km/hr were successful at re-suspending dust in Taranaki and halted clean-up operations during a dust storm in 1996 :

(Picture from page 335 of report titled 'Rehabilitation of the former nuclear test sites at Emu and Maralinga (Australia) 2003'; link (26.9 MB)  Also, see 'Plutonium resuspension and airborne dust loadings in the desert environment of Maralinga, South Australia' published in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity (Volume 20, Issue 2, 1993, Pages 117-131) regarding resuspension of plutonium particles during dust storms.)

 

Fallout maps - from the 'Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia' (Australian Govt. Pub. Service, 1985)

Footnotes

¹ 'On the second day of gale force winds a massive dust storm gathered moment with strong westerly winds scooping up sand and dust from the Maralinga direction in the Western Desert and spreading it across the country.' - Coober Pedy Regional Times

² Maralinga was host to 7 of Britain's atmospheric nuclear tests and over 550 'minor trials,' or nuclear experiments involving plutonium and uranium and other radioactive or hazardous materials.  Upwards of several tons of hazardous or radiological substances and 20 kilograms of plutonium were used in these 'trials.'  The plutonium used in about 20 'safety experiments' (dubbed 'Vixen A' and 'Vixen B' trials) scattered plutonium 239 debris far and wide across the desert, similar to 'safety tests' conducted in the U.S. Nevada desert.  Vixen B trials involved the explosion (sometimes causing a nuclear yield) of real warheads to see what would happen and how far (hint: many kilometers) the many pounds of plutonium in the warhead would travel; only one such test involving a real warhead was carried out by the U.S.: Project 57. (The plumes from 1950s' U.S. 'safety experiments' sent plutonium hundreds of miles from Southern Nevada into Northern Utah).  

Maralinga's seven nuclear tests were the 1956 tests dubbed One Tree, Marcoo, Kite, and Breakaway; and the 1957 tests Tadje, Biak and Taranaki.   (Two additional nuclear tests, Totem 1 and 2, were conducted at Emu Field; and three more - Hurricane, which was tracked by aircraft to Fiji, and Mosaic G1 and G2 on the Monte Bello Islands.)  According to John Keane's article 'Maralinga's afterlife' in the Sunday Age on 5.11.2003, Kite's 'cloud drifted out of control, southwards, over the sleeping city of Adelaide, whose population was 518,000 at the time.'  Huge swaths of land from the fallout of the seven nuclear tests include - in the top few centimeters of the desert floor - the radioactive elements Strontium-90 and Cesium-137, both organ-seeking carcinogens that are still radioactive at about 25% of their original 1950's levels.  In Paul Langley's new book 'The Black Mist and its Aftermath - Oral Histories by Lallie Lennon,' he provides evidence that Totem 1 resulted in a 'Black Mist' (similar to a 'grey mist' seen and photographed in 1953 by Joe Fallini in Nevada) that engulfed and caused beta-burns on a local indigenous population.

How much of Australia's land was contaminated by these nuclear tests?  Well, the above map appeared in the submitted testimony to the Standing Committee On Foreign Affairs, Defence And Trade Inquiry into the Australian Participants in British Nuclear Tests (Treatment) Bill 2006.  It was submitted by Paul Langley, a former Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers Storeman Technical Clerk Radiological Safety Non-Commissioned Officer.  Langley noted in his testimony:

"The Australian Atomic Weapons Test Safety Committee did produce nine fallout maps. These maps were produced by the 28 monitoring stations laying out strips of sticky paper in the open...

There are four issues which come out of the production and presentation of these maps. 

1. There were 12 atomic bomb tests, not nine, so we are lacking fallout maps for the Hurricane, Totem 1 and Totem 2 tests. This is a careless oversight given the controversy which still surrounds the Black Mist Incident. (A controversy which does not exist in the minds of those who witnessed the deaths and illnesses). 
2. The maps clearly show fallout was deposited outside the designated “test areas”. 
3. .... Australia used the same fallout method [gummed-film]. The maps were produced on the assumption that the gummed or sticky paper was 100% accurate. In fact, the method under reads by 50%. [more here] .... the inadequacy of the retention method (gum) meant the fallout particles fell off. 
4. The maps are presented as nine discrete entities, which exist without reference to each other.... From the point of view of the biologist or medical doctor, it ignores the fact of bio accumulation...  ...from the point of view of people who were subject to fallout from all of the bombs, we can simply add them up to see those areas of high fallout bioaccumulation and repeated exposure dose. The easiest way to do this is to print the nine maps onto transparent sheets and overlay them. The result is as follows: [see above map]...

This map is a contrast map showing areas of repeated dosing of radioactive fallout. It is not a calibrated map, It does not take into account the effect of decay between bombings. But neither does the Allowable Lifetime Dose as prescribed by the IAEA. The biological effect of exposure is permanent and cumulative. The different approaches to this matter by nuclear scientists and biologists and doctors explains the unending tension between the nukers and the health professionals. 

Importantly, it shows that the effects of the tests ranged far beyond the designated “test areas”, includes Indigenous land, people, and food and explains at a glance why Indigenous people were so vulnerable: They ate soley local food, which had minimal processing such as peeling or washing. Indigenous people had no drains or laundry facilities so any removed contamination was not moved off site. In fact, the military’s poison was blown and washed onto Indigenous people...

I submit the whole of Australia was part of the test area [same for NTS] and scientific studies of the White Australian diet, from Perth to Cairns, over many decades, bear this out."

³ Critical comments on the Maralinga Rehabilitation Project cleanup project here and here

LINKS:

Nuclear test sites worldwide map:
http://www.radicalcartography.net/?nuclear

U.K. tests (in Australia) information and fallout map; or here

Engadine (Lucas Heights), AU gamma monitoring station (map of roughly where it is; south of Syndey)

READ about the 'Minor Trials' from an excerpt of the 1985 'Report of the Royal Commission into British Nuclear Tests in Australia':

'Chapter 10: The Minor Trials; 10.0 Introduction': 395
'10.1 Nature of Minor Trials': Kittens, Tims, Rats: 396, Vixen A, Vixen B: 397
'Material Left on the Range': 398, 399, 400, 401
'Table 10.1.1 Plutonium used at the Various Minor Trials Sites': 399
'Table 10.1.2 Beryllium used and dispersed at the Various Minor Trials Sites': 
'Table 10.1.3 Uranium used at the Various Minor Trials Sites': 401
'10.2 The Politics of the Minor Trials': 402, 403, 404, 405, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 414
'Conclusion': 415

Section 12.10 'The Minor Trials':

'Kittens 1953' p. 505 
'Kittens and Tims 1955' p.506, 507, 508
'The Press and the Public' p.508, 509
'Minor Trials 1956' p.509, 510, 511
'Minor Trials 1957' p.511
'Minor Trials 1958' p.511, 512
'Minor Trials 1959' p. 512, 513, 514, 515
'Minor Trials 1960' p.515, 516, 517, 518, 519, 520
'Minor Trials 1961' p.520, 521
'Minor Trials 1962' p.521, 522
'Minor Trials 1963' p. 523, 524
'Conclusions' p.524, 525, 526

Maps from 'A History of British Atomic Tests in Australia,' by Dr. J.L. Symond, Australian Publishing Service, April 1985:

Trajectories and fallout regions for Antler Rounds
Trajectories and fallout regions for G1; First chart, second
Trajectories and fallout regions for G2: First chart, second
Maralinga range
Emu, Maralinga and Environs

Side Note:  A rain-out in upstate New York in 1953 caused the upper portion of the radioactive cloud of Shot Simon (from the Nevada Test Site) to deposit extremely concentrated fallout onto the greater Albany area, exposing the populace to doses in the many Rems, many times the permissible yearly radiation dose.  In the Southern Hemisphere, wherever the contaminated red dust from the 2009 dust storms is now lingering, it will be brought down to Earth by gravity and by rain over time.  Whenever the latter occurs (rain), radioactivity will cling to surface areas (shingles, pavement, cars, crops, etc...) and mix into water supplies, which will stay contaminated over the duration of radioactive elements' half-life, which can be hundreds or thousands of years.  Ingesting radiation (internal exposure) from contaminated foodstuffs and water constitutes the greatest danger from radiation exposure.