Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown will hold crunch talks next week with the Ministry of Defence in an 11th-hour bid to halt Dalgety Bay beach being turned into the first tract of radiation-contaminated land in the UK.
The MoD has, he insisted, ”a moral responsibility” to deal with the issue of radiation, which is widely regarded to have come from the remains of aircraft when there was a base at Donibristle during the Second World War.
If a plan is not agreed by the end of the month the Scottish Environment Protection Agency has warned it will carry out its threat.
A glimmer of hope emerged last week when SEPA broadly agreed with the scope of the MoD’s proposals to tackle the issue, where ”hotspots” of radiation were first discovered more than 20 years ago.
However, Mr Brown, MP for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, who lives only a few miles away from the beach, wants the MoD to agree to clear up the area, pay for the work necessary and issue a timetable for it to be carried out.
Writing exclusively for Tuesday’s Courier, Mr Brown says only then can SEPA withdraw its threat to designate the land as contaminated a decision which can never be reversed and leave the people in the town ”more secure”.
”Dalgety Bay residents have been patient, trusting that an answer can be found to a complex problem,” he writes. ”In the last three months, as a result of our local pressure, the MoD have agreed to continuous monitoring and survey work and they have now produced an investigation plan with its three stages of action.
”Now they have to make the final decision that they will fund the necessary remedial work on the site.”
Next Monday, only 24 hours before the Dalgety Bay Forum meets to hear the contents of that plan, Mr Brown will be in Whitehall asking Defence Secretary Philip Hammond to take action.
”No nuclear base, no nuclear power station, no nuclear weapon site in any part of the UK has ever been declared radiation-contaminated,” Mr Brown says. ”And nor should Dalgety Bay.”
He says the solution to the decades-old problem is simple the ministry should agree to clean up the beach and produce a plan and date for the work.
”I have said that the MoD should accept now what they agreed many years ago that the particles are indeed the result of the breakup of the airfield in the late 1950s, and they have a moral responsibility to deal with the effects,” he said.See further coverage in Tuesday’s Courier