A Place to Stand

  SEPA, while claiming there is a radiation risk at Dalgety Bay, through numerous FoI inquiries (the latest of which have will put up shortly) have gone to great length to not even estimate how much radiation was ever released there. By comparison we know that the average square mile to a depth of 1 foot, or 3rd of a mile to a depth of 3 feet which is a better comparison with the ground SEPA have been examining, contains 3 tonnes of uranium, 6 tonnes of similarly radioactive thorium and, as a consequence of the breakdown of these, 1 gram of radium.

  So if SEPA won't make the estimate of radium that could possibly ever have been dumped there lets try it ourselves.

  Assuming each of the figures on dials, painted in radium paint was 7mm long (1/3rd inch) and 2mm wide.
  That there are 20 figures on each dial and they average twice the size of a single line
  That there were 10 painted dials per aircraft (this may be high since we are dealing with relatively primative WW2 bombers)
  20 aircraft were broken up there

   Then the total area of paint would have been  {7 X2 X 20 X 2 X 10 X 20.) 56,000 square millimeters or 0.056 square metre.

    Commercial paint is advertised as covering 13 metres with a 1 litre can. I litre of water is 1 kg. I assume paint is similar.
    Commercial paint runs at "about 6 to about 13 percent by weight of a pigment paste composition". Since radium is very many times rarer and more expensive than normal dyes I would expect it to make up a much smaller proportion than that, perhaps mixed with other pigment or with some reflective backing, but to calculate the maximum possible amount of radium I will assume the 6%.

     So the weight of radium that could possibly ever have been dumped is { 0.056 X 6% /13 ) 0.00026 kg or 0.26 g. A quarter of the amount of radium to be found there naturally.

    By comparison SEPA already know that the amount of radiation in any street in Aberdeen is more than half as much again as at Dalgety Bay ie over half a gram.

    This is all as nothing compared to the 9 tonnes of uranium and thorium but SEPA have decided to ignore the science and pretend that radiation from radium has some magical effect makingb it more important than the 9 tons of other radioactives 9 BILLION times greater (1kg = 0.001tonne). However even ignoring SEPA's fraud in pretending to ignore 99.99999999% of the radioactives reveals that their scare story is still false.
      
     There was less radium, alone, in that ground, than occurs naturally up the road in Aberdeen.

     The operative word being "was". If the dials were not recycled, or taken by souvnir hunters this paint was still water soluble and over the intervening period it is virtually certain that, on a beach in Fife, it would have got wet and mostly washed away. SEPA's answer to that is that it is possible, though there is no evidence for it, that the dials might have been burnt and that this would, in some undisclosed way, have chemically altered the paint ot make it non-soluble. However if that had happened then obviously some ot the paint would also have been altered into smoke and blown away.

     If SEPA have been telling the truth in their responses to various FoI legal questions they have made absolutely no attempt whatsoever to quantify the alleged maximum possible exposure. In which case this estimate, by default, is the most (indeed only) credible one.

    I will be sending it to SEPA to see if they have any factual dispute of this estimate and any alternative. Or if they have not, if they dispute in any way that their entire scare story is proven false and that their threat to declare the beach "radioactive contamination" is wholly, completely and totally fraudulent and could never, under any circumstances, have been made by any organisation which was not wholly, completely and totally corrupt bureaucratic empire-builders or even any organisation which, while being so corrupt, was not wholly, completely and totally scientifically illiterate.

    I will also be sending this out as a press release to the Scottish and British press and a few politicians. Anybody want to bet on how much, if any, of our media are remotely interested in reporting wholesale fraud by government departments and the deliberate attempt to falsely smear a decent community. Over the next few days we will all find out if any part at all of the MSM is remotely interested in reporting corruption, scaremongering and lies.

    I will look forward to seeing if, after repeatedly answering FoI's by saying they have no estimate of the theoretical maximum exposure, they now produce some alternative to this one.