Maralinga bomb sites still contaminated in 1985 before big cleanup; soldiers found to have been test guinea pigs
The souvenir tie, featuring an Aboriginal man with a woomera and spear, given to personnel who served at the Maralinga nuclear test site.
Image courtesy Wikipedia
Moves to have Maralinga in South Australia’s northwest as a British nuclear bombs test site beyond the 1950s were quashed by Australian public support sinking from 58% in 1952 to 37% in 1957. This worldwide trend saw the 1958-61 moratorium on nuclear testing.
After 1963, Maralinga was in caretaker status and, despite talk of having minor trials in 1966, the British government didn’t renew the 1956 agreement. In 1968, the Australian defence minister revoked Maralinga as a prohibited area and in 1972 the supply minister removed most restrictions on Maralinga, keeping only a 48-by-240km strip as Woomera prohibited area.
Cleanups at Maralinga in 1963, 1964 and 1967 removed major hazards for entry to the test sites. Attempts were made to dilute radioactive material by turning over and mixing surface soil. Highly contaminated soil from Wewak was buried in the Marcoo crater and the debris pits capped. Short-lived isotopes decayed away, leaving plutonium, with its half-life of 24,100 years, as the main hazard. In 1979, the British government agreed to “repatriation” of recoverable plutonium buried at Maralinga.
In 1984, the federal resources and energy minister set up the Kerr committee to review the tests fallout. After its report, and discussions with John Symonds, who wrote an official history of the tests, the McClelland royal commission, convened in 1985, found significant radiation hazards still at many Maralinga sites, especially Taranaki. The government accepted all findings except that the British government pay all cleanup costs. The recommended cleanup was completed in 2000 for $108 million. In 1993, the British government agreed to £20 million to rehabilitate the site.
In the worst areas, 350,000 cubic metres of soil and debris were removed from more than two square kilometres and buried in trenches. Eleven debris pits were treated. Most of the site (about 3,200 square kilometres) was made safe for unrestricted access and about 120 square kilometres considered safe for access but not “permanent occupancy”.
A veterans affairs department study concluded that radioactive doses “received by Australian participants were small. ... Only 2% of participants received more than the current Australian annual dose limit for occupationally exposed persons (20 mSv)”. This was contested.
Australian servicemen had been ordered to fly through mushroom clouds from atomic explosions without protection; and to march into ground zero after bombs. A 1999 study for the British nuclear test veterans association found 30% had died, mostly in their fifties, from cancers.
In 2001, Dundee University researcher Sue Rabbit Roff uncovered evidence that troops were ordered to run, walk and crawl across areas contaminated by the Buffalo tests after detonations – a fact the British government later admitted.
Australian governments failed to compensate servicemen who contracted cancers after exposure to Maralinga radiation, after a British decision in 1988 to compensate its own servicemen. The Australian government eventually negotiated compensation for several Australian servicemen with leukaemia and the rare blood disorder multiple myeloma.
