A Shipwreck Sends a Warning

By Natalie Angler

Uranium cargo raises new fears about nuclear hazards

At low tide in the rough waters of the North Sea, it looked like a dead whale floating on its belly. But the Mont Louis, a 4,210-ton French container ship that sank on Aug. 25 after colliding with a German passenger ferry eleven miles from the Belgian coast, was very much alive with frenzied activity. Three tugboats buzzed noisily around it, while black dinghies delivered wet-suited divers. The focus of their labors: 360 tons of uranium hexafluoride, raw material from which nuclear fuel is made and which is not a severe radiation danger. Three barrels, however, contained uranium that had been partly processed into fuel, a form that is more hazardous. As yet, divers taking daily readings of the water have not detected any signs of leaking radioactivity. More worrisome is the uranium's volatility: should it mix with water, it would be transformed chemically into an acid that could easily explode. Loose in the sea, it could poison any marine life near by. Warns Shoja Etamad, a nuclear engineer based in Paris: "No one really knows what happens when you deal with quantities on this scale."

To forestall a disaster, the divers began carving a 10 ft. by 17 ft. hole in the hull. A giant floating crane operated by Smit Tak International, a Rotterdam company that often retrieves sunken ships from places like the war-torn Persian Gulf, will be towed out to sea on a platform to pluck out the barrels gingerly, an operation that will probably take about a month. Declares Smit Tak International's managing director, Klaas Reinigert: "Compared with all the other jobs we've done, this one's easy." Despite the intense publicity that the sinking of the Mont Louis has received throughout Europe, the Belgian government seems to have had no trouble in convincing the public that everything is perfectly safe.

Tourists at resorts along the coast continue to relax, seemingly untroubled, on the beaches. Said one swimmer near Ostend: "I don't read newspapers while I'm on vacation."

At first there had been widespread alarm, particularly when the ship's owner, the Compagnie Generale Maritime, was evasive about details of the accident. Forty-eight hours after the sinking, the Belgian government was still uncertain about the nature of the cargo on board. On the other hand, Greenpeace, the international environmental organization, had already revealed that the Mont Louis had been carrying a cargo of uranium. Confusion mounted when crew members claimed they had been told that they were shipping radioactive goods for medical purposes.

Finally, after much prodding by Greenpeace, the French admitted the true nature of the freight: uranium that was being shipped to the Soviet Union to be processed into nuclear fuel and then returned to Europe for use in nuclear power plants. Belgium, Italy and Switzerland have had similar arrangements with the Soviets since 1973, when the U.S., which then had a virtual monopoly on enrichment technology, sharply raised its prices. The French recently extended their agreements with the Soviet Union through the year 2010.

More important, perhaps, was the fact that the sinking of the Mont Louis and its cargo underscored the growing hazard of transporting nuclear materials. As atomic power becomes ever more widely used internationally, some critics charge that a careless and secretive attitude is developing toward the treatment of potentially dangerous nuclear materials. Wrote the prestigious French newspaper Le Monde: "Nuclear energy is made commonplace, except in the domain of information, where there still reigns a mania for secrecy." The Mont Louis previously carried paper pulp and was not designed for the shipment of possibly dangerous cargoes. None of the 23-man crew had any experience in handling nuclear materials. When the collision occurred, the ship was steering through fog, and for some reason the sailor on watch was not at his post. The transport of radioactive material over water in Western Europe is regulated by the International Maritime Dangerous Goods Code, but the rules are dated and are now being revised by the International Maritime Organization.

In the future, the hazards of transporting dangerous materials by sea are certain to increase. Some time soon, perhaps this month, 100 lbs. of plutonium (enough to build more than 10 nuclear bombs) will be ferried from France to Japan for processing into reactor fuel, the first such shipment of its kind by sea. A small armada of ships is expected to accompany the plutonium to prevent any terrorist attacks, and environmentalists are planning major protests. Says Hans Guyt of Greenpeace: "We think the whole business of transporting nuclear material should be stopped, and stopped immediately."

--By Natalie Angler. Reported by William Dowell/Paris and Gary Yerkey/Ostend

With reporting by William Dowell, Gary Yerkey