A UK consultancy has won a European Commission contract to provide a scientific contribution to the work of the OSPAR (Oslo and Paris) Commission, an intergovernmental organisation established to protect the marine environment in the north-east Atlantic Ocean.
The two-year “Marina” project will assess the impact of: waste dumping, the scuttling of reactors, submarine accidents in the north Atlantic, Bay of Biscay, Kara and Barents Seas; the Chernobyl fallout; discharges from nuclear plants; plutonium and caesium accumulated in the Irish Sea sediments on the rest of the environment; discharges from reprocessing plants; and naturally occurring radioactive materials.
NNC will manage the project, involving scientists from the UK National Radiological Protection Board, Netherlands Institute for Fishery Investigation, RisO National Laboratory (Denmark), CEPN (France), SPA Typhoon (Russia), University College Dublin, NRG (Netherlands) and other companies. The study will be performed in collaboration with OSPAR, the EC and other international organisations, including Greenpeace, IAEA, Friends of the Earth and the International Union of Radioecologists.
