More radioactive material has gone missing off the coast of Scotland

AN EXPERIMENT designed to discover the fate of 28 tonnes of depleted uranium in shells fired into the sea off south-west Scotland has gone disastrously wrong. Military scientists have lost DU samples they placed on the seabed to see if the original shells might have corroded, leaching the dense, radioactive metal into the sea.

Last year, the British government's Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA) put 90 small cylinders of DU on the seabed of the Solway Firth. But last month they went missing after severe storms buffeted the region.

The experiment was a response to public concern about the dangers of 6900 DU shells fired into the Firth from tanks on the Dundrennan army range near Kirkcudbright over the past 20 years. Despite searches, scientists found no trace of these shells, though a fisherman dredged one up by accident in 1997.

To try and find out what had happened to the shells, DERA intended to retrieve its DU samples for analysis from time to time. But when divers tried to do this in early February, the samples had gone. The seabed rig holding 66 of the cylinders was badly damaged, while another 24 cylinders that had been buried in the silt could not be traced.

Divers from the Faslane nuclear submarine base on the Clyde are due to start hunting for the missing DU samples next week. The samples are "a negligible addition" to the DU shells already on the seabed, a DERA spokeswoman says. DERA scientists believe DU in the sea forms an insoluble sludge of hydrated uranium oxide which is dispersed by underwater currents.

But the Scottish Environment Protection Agency points out that without the evidence it's impossible to be sure. "At present we are unable to provide proper public reassurance," says the agency's chairman, Ken Collins. Environmentalists fear that the shells could break up and be washed ashore on beaches in storms.