MoD under fire over 'atomic beach'

Former Government experts, current advisers and senior politicians have condemned the MoD's monitoring of the Fife site as inadequate, ineffectual and incompetent. According to one of the MoD's own former radiation scientists, the ministry can no longer be trusted to do the job – though it must pay for it.

"Because of the MoD's failure to properly assess the extent and risks from the contamination, any further surveys or assessments should not be carried out by the MoD, or MoD contractors," said Fred Dawson, who worked for the MoD for 31 years before he left as head of the radiation protection policy team in 2009.

"Nor should the MoD, or MoD contractors, be allowed to participate or undertake remediation work. The MoD's role should be limited to providing the necessary finance to remediate the beach." The MoD, he said, "has consistently done all it can to avoid admitting liability for the contamination, which in all probability it caused".

Dalgety Bay is an up-market town on the Firth of Forth, known for its popular sailing club. But in the last few weeks it has become notorious as the home to some of the most dangerous and most disputed radioactive contamination in Britain.

During the second world war, it hosted the Donibristle airfield and repair yard, which handled over 7000 planes. After the war, however, the radium used to coat aircraft dials so they could be seen in the dark was burnt and dumped in the area.

Radium can be a killer. It killed the Nobel prize-winner who discovered it, Marie Curie, in 1898, and it killed the women workers in the US who licked the brushes they used to paint the dials early last century.

At Dalgety Bay, it lay forgotten until it was accidentally discovered by a team from the nearby Rosyth naval dockyard in 1990. Since then, monitoring by various agencies has found and removed over 1600 radioactively contaminated items from the foreshore, from tiny particles to pieces the size of half-bricks.

Two months ago, however, things got more serious. The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) announced it had found a lump of debris that was more than 10 times more radioactive than anything previously found in the area.

Since then, Sepa scientists have found three more highly radioactive fragments, including one 76 times more radioactive than earlier finds. Families were told to leave the beach while it was extracted and removed to a four-inch thick lead box, which still emits radiation 20 times higher than normal background levels.

Since September 12, Sepa has found 442 contaminated items, far more than in any previous year.

However, MoD monitoring of the same area in September only detected 33 radioactive particles. In other words, the MoD missed the vast majority of the pollution.

"We have doubts about the MoD's survey," said the Sepa radiation specialist leading the Dalgety Bay investigation, Dr Paul Dale.

"We've raised our concerns with the MoD and they say it was done competently but because of what we've found we've no grounds to believe them. We don't believe that the MoD's survey was effective."

Sepa's loss of confidence in the MoD is betrayed by the minutes of a meeting in Edinburgh between the agencies on October 24, released under freedom of information law. It was dominated by tetchy interchanges between officials.

Dale argued that it was "clearly unacceptable" for the MoD to overlook 90% of the pollution. The MoD eventually accepted it had missed some highly radioactive contamination, and promised to examine "discrepancies in monitoring data".

Dale also said it would be "difficult to tell the public that monitoring has stopped." In response, Iain Robertson, of the MoD's Defence Infrastructure Organisation, "stated that Sepa do not need to tell the press".

Radiation expert Dr Ian Fairlie, a former senior civil servant at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs in London, thought the MoD's "indifference" to the risks at Dalgety Bay was characteristic. He compared it with the MoD's "heartless denial" of cancers suffered by nuclear test veterans, its refusal to recognise the hazards of depleted uranium weapons and its poor radiation safety in nuclear submarines and at MoD sites.

"The common factor is that defence ministers have received ill-informed advice about the real risks of radiation," said Fairlie. "In my view, senior MoD officials responsible for giving this consistent misinformation to ministers should be reprimanded."

To assess the danger at Dalgety Bay, Sepa last week appointed a panel of independent experts. One of them is Dr Andrew Tyler, the head of biological and environmental sciences at Stirling University.

"It is clear that Sepa's monitoring has been far more effective than that undertaken by the MoD," he said. "The fact that such high activity particles have been missed indicates that the MoD's monitoring may well have been inadequate and must be reviewed as a matter of priority."

He said particles found at Dalgety Bay were similar to those found on the foreshore at Dounreay, which is closed to the public. "The big question is how many other particles like these remain in the environment."

Annabelle Ewing, the SNP MSP for Mid Scotland and Fife, said: "It looks as if the MoD simply didn't look properly because it didn't want to find anything."

According to the former prime minister and Labour MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, Gordon Brown, the MoD's monitoring "may have been inadequate".

He used a Commons debate last week to pressure the MoD to pay for a clean-up. This weekend, he called for the MoD to be represented "at a senior level" at a public meeting on the contamination on December 16.

Sepa has given the MoD until the end of February to come up with a clean-up plan – or Sepa will use its legal powers to designate Dalgety Bay as the UK's first radioactively contaminated land.

So far, the MoD has refused to budge – and has notably declined to defend its monitoring.

"The MoD fully appreciates the concerns of residents and has demonstrated a serious commitment to assisting Sepa," insisted a spokeswoman, who said the MoD would keep working with Sepa and would join the expert panel.

"New radioactive sources have been found at Dalgety Bay and we take this very seriously. However, it is not yet clear what the level of risk is."