Volume 9/Number 1/January 1978

Viewpoint is a column which allows authors to express their own opinions about current events.

Whose Baby are the Nasty Cargoes? by ELIZABETH YOUNG

Is Britain, coastal state with full measure of all a coastal state's possible problems, doing enough to identify these problems? to bring them to the notice of our partners in the Community and in NATO, and of our neighbours in these northern seas? to equip ourselves (and them) with the necessary jurisdictional rights in UNCLOS? Those of us who have for some time been advocating that a senior cabinet minister be given responsibility for actively managing Britain's maritime policy--we have not been advocating a mammoth new Department of Maritime Affairs--have a strong feeling that there are sizeable gaps still unplugged in that policy, and many stools between which unexamined matters fall and disappear. That parts of the policy are now con- ducted through or by European Community organs makes right policy all the more difficult to discern, and opportunities in UNCLOS all the more difficult to seize.

The largest unexamined matter is perhaps the fact that while we are increasingly a coastal region with heavy local interests and responsibilities, our interests as a maritime region are not only shrinking in proportion our coastal interests--which they are--but are changing and coming to require the establishment of the same international Rule of Law that our coastal interests require. Our maritime interests are not served any longer by the mere maintenance of the inherited system of free seas and open competition. The arrival in our own maritime backyards of a Soviet Blue Water Navy and of heavily subsidized Soviet and East European merchant and fishing fleets should be enough to remind us how quickly the beloved open market-place can, technology- assisted, turn into a very nasty jungle where we are no longer top beast. To prevent this jungle, we must move at UNCLOS in anticipation of what is coming our way, rather than from recollection or nostalgia.

The swift development of oil and gas production in the North Sea took us, technologically, by surprise, so that only now is much of the basic research getting under way: height of waves, corrosion, metal fatigue, even surveying to modern standards the 72°/0 of the British Shelf where that has not been done. So far, there have been no disasters, but it seems likely that the rapid increase that can be foreseen in the quantity, the variety, the riskiness, and the nastiness of traffic through our waters in the next few years, will also find us inadequate- ly prepared. In particular, to judge from the latest text to emerge from UNCLOS, the Composite Negotiating Text (CNT), we are likely to find ourselves short of sufficient jurisdiction to regulate traffic, not only where the (partly revised) doctrine of innocent passage

operates, in our territorial waters, hut also where the doctrine of free navigation operates, in our Exclusive Economic Zone, and where the new doctrine of free transit is to operate, in the International Straits which penetrate our territorial waters. This traffic will certainly include bulk chemicals (some liquid), liquified gases, and nuclear cargoes of various kinds.

The British Government has for some time held the rather uncharacteristically 'coastal' view that in certain circumstances, for instance when there is imminent danger from a 'casualty' of grave harm to British interests, HMG has the right to take extreme measures, even to sending in the Navy to sink or blow up a ship that threatens, say, massive oil pollution: the Prevention of Oil Pollution Act of 1971 allowed precisely this, even when the ship concerned was on the High Seas and whatever flag it might be flying. This kind of spasm response to an imminent threat of pollution by oil was later given international legitimacy when the 1969 International Convention Relating to Intervention on the High Seas in Cases of Oil Pollution Casualties came into force in 1975. Useful though this international agreement may be, instant reaction, however legitimate, is not the most desirable or useable tool for effective traffic management. (The right of HMG to detail the army to bomb or to shoot up a rogue road tanker carry- ing a dangerous load would not generally be thought sufficient for regulating such traffic on land). Yet this is all, in the way of 'own jurisdiction' that the coastal state itself is likely to get if the CNT is carried through into international law. In the event of other identified pollu- tion (not deserving spasm response) the coastal state, according to Article 219, would be able to call in aid to prosecute malefactor vessels not only, as (insufficiently) at present, the flag state but also a state into whose port the vessel chooses to go. Management--as opposed to subsequent prosecution--is not much further ahead.

CNT allows Traffic Separation Schemes and some other rules to be prescribed by the coastal state within its territorial waters (now to be twelve nautical miles broad), in International Straits within its territorial sea, (where however "all ships and aircraft enjoy the right of transit passage, which shall not be impeded"), and possibly in certain particularly sensitive areas of their Exclusive Economic Zone (between 12 and 200 n.m.) which have been internationally recognized as such. But these traffic schemes and rules must always be in accordance with existing, internationally accepted, norms and, in Inter- national Straits and the EEZ, they must be approved by the appropriate international body. And they may

not, apparently, apply to design, construction and operation, even if IMCO has made recommendations about precisely that. It will still be for the flag state, on receipt of complaint from the coastal state, to enforce whatever rules there may be, and to prosecute its own vessels.

In the Channel, only some 20% of all 'rogues' are positively identified; two useful new rules of innocent passage would be that all vessels should display their name so that it could be read from the air, and that they should be equipped with transponders, so that they can be identified from fast moving aircraft.

The exception to the general laxity of the proposed r~gime is in the event of imminent and grave danger of oil pollution--and only of oil pollution--to the coastal state, when, as we have seen, the latter may take things into its own hands. There is a 1973 Protocol to the 1969 Intervention Convention extenting its provisions to cover Other Substances than Oil, but it is not yet in force, nor has HMG itself taken powers to extend the 1971 Prevention o f Oil Pollution Act to cover say, pollution from chemical tankers or liquefied gas carriers, let alone to carriers of nuclear material.l

This is where coming events are casting baleful shadows before. There are international codes drawn up for the design, construction and operation of tankers carrying hazardous liquid chemical and liquified gases, but although that for liquid chemicals is apparently "applied by the majority of the maritime countries whose merchant fleets include such ships, that for liquified gases has only recently been adopted by IMCO and will apply to new ships only ''2 (emphasis added). And in any case the coastal state may not enforce rules concerning design, construction and operation.

IMCO's Sub-Committee on Standards o f Training and Watchkeeping is at present producing recommend- ations concerning the training and qualifications of officers and crews of ships carrying liquified gases and hazardous noxious chemicals in bulk; but these will take considerable time to work through first the system of IMCO approval and then that of governmental signa- tures and ratifications, before they begin to be implemented in practice. And nuclear cargoes, worrying not only because of the physical risks involved but for the political dangers of theft and diversion, seem to fall between the two stools of IMCO and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

Meanwhile the quantity of dangerous cargoes in transit through British and North West European ~vaters is increasing, and will go on increasing. Nearly three years ago Dr Fred C. Ikl6, then Director of the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, speaking on "the Worldwide Spread of Nuclear Technology" to the National Security Industrial Association in Washington, said "we have estimated that in twenty years, the fissionable material in foreign transit each year will be enough to make some 20 000 bombs. '3

How much of this transit would be by sea he did not say, but there is no reason to suppose it would not be substantial. In 1976, Dr Ikl~ suggested at a UN sponsored Conference on Nuclear Energy and World Order that an "international nuclear transportation service to handle nuclear materials safely" should be set up to "provide

Marine Pollution Bulletin

special security measures and communications net- works, backed up by realistic emergency procedures. . ." We "could thus make a beginning for the organizational structure that future generations will need to guard these materials through the millennia of their dangerous lifetime." The British view seems to have been that such a service would attract unwelcome attention, that its ships and aircraft would be potential targets and there- fore that the present practice, involving as little publicity as possible, is best. Dr Ikl~'s proposal seems to have sunk without trace. Meanwhile nuclear cargoes are set to increase in number if Japanese as well as Italian nuclear material is brought here for reprocessing. The special (armed) Atomic Energy Authority Constabulary, responsible for the security of nuclear materials in transit in Britain does not go to sea.

It is not known what incidents involving ships carry- ing nuclear cargoes there may have been worldwide, although according to Ministers none have yet happened to British ships. Given that more than half the world's collisions at sea (not to mention strandings) occur between the Western approaches to the English Channel and the Elbe, British ships are clearly at risk, and the more so the more reprocessing we do in the future. There are no specific rules, even for the reporting of accidents, that apply to foreign flag carriers of dangerous cargoes within British territorial waters.

There are two kinds of nuclear material that may be in transit at sea, the latter of which would be, to those so-minded, well worth diverting: (1) irradiated fuel, which can, in well designed vessels and with properly trained crews, travel safely and will pose, in the event of casualty, only a moderate risk of radiation in the sea; (2) (and far more dangerous) is fabricated fuel elements, made of enriched uranium and of plutonium. They are likely to be shipped on a large enough scale for the necessary jurisdictional problems to be sorted out now: it will be too late when UNCLOS III has terminated its work. It is worth noting that the materials produced by fast breeder reactors may well be transported in containers filled with liquid sodium, which is itself inflammable on contact with air or water.

British Nuclear Fuels Ltd are now planning to convert three cargo ships into specialized nuclear fuel carriers and have ordered their first 'custom-built' vessel, to 'passenger-liner safety standards'. In Japan the first ship specifically built for carrying used nuclear fuel has just been completed. This, according to Japanese sources, "is designed to withstand a shock from a collision with a 23 000 ton ship moving at 15 knots". (It seems possible that some vessels over 23 000 tons may move at more than 15 knots--or indeed at 7V2 knots if the vessels are approaching each other at the same speed).

According to Article 23 of CNT, vessels carrying 'nuclear and other inherently dangerous or noxious sub- stances' shall carry 'documents' and 'observe special precautionary measures' when exercising the right of innocent passage. However, should such vessels not observe these 'measures', or indeed any other normal safety rules, the coastal state itself can do nothing but identify them and report to the flag state. Even if a vessel is suspected, on however reasonable grounds, of

Volume 9/Number l/January 1978

illicit traffic in nuclear cargoes, only the flag state has the right to take action, and it remains entirely optional to the flag state whether it accepts any 'charter of duties' that IMCO or any other body may seek to lay at its door. International dumping is of course tightly restricted but the de facto dumping, which occurs when cargoes of material which may not be dumped are lost overboard or sink with a vessel, is not regulated. In the case of the Cavtat, a Yugoslav vessel, with a British manufactured cargo of lead tetraethyl and lead tetramethyl in barrels, that went down off Otranto in 1974 after a collision with a Panamanian vessel, the Italian authorities find themselves paying several millions of pounds to retrieve the barrels, already leaking and highly poisonous. Neither flag state nor owners have been willing to do anything.

It is not that action against hostes humani generis-- against the enemies of human kind--is not known in international law: there are specific international rules, retained in CNT, prohibiting the transport of slaves, suppressing 'illicit traffic in narcotic drugs or psycho- tropic substances', and even suppressing 'unauthorised broadcasting on the high seas'. In each case foreign warships may board vessels 'reasonably' suspected of contravening these rules. But not in the case of illicit carriage of nuclear materials. There have been too many reports in the press in recent months of nuclear cargoes disappearing for this state of affairs to be acceptable; the most recent story concerned a lead container of 1.5 kilograms of enriched uranium found on a Norwegian freighter that docked at Ancona in Italy on a regular passage from Iran. The package turned out not to be one of several containers that had been reported missing the previous year from a Swedish vessel on its way to Hamburg from Boston! 4 If such material can vanish when under the control of the Swedish, the West German, and the American authorities, what can be expected when it is under that of less highly organized, or less respectable, parties?

In 1973 the National Physical Laboratory reported that 3407o of ships passing through the Dover Strait were carrying some kind of dangerous cargo, including oil. Since then, the proport ion and the variety of dangerous cargoes has gone up, and will continue to do so for some years; so has the size of carriers. As Lord Inchcape, President of the General Council of British Shipping, was telling an audience early this year; "Cer ta in types of chemical and gas pollution would pose hazards to the environment far transcending the order of magnitude that massive oil pollution presents". 5 One result of the requirement that gas be no longer flared from oil instal- lations will be that many more liquid gas carriers will be operating in the North Sea each of which, if it were to be set up on land, would be a 'notifiable installation' requiring the approval of the Health and Safety Executive under the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act.

The risk is this: a spill of the liquid boils, becomes vapour, mixes with oxygen, and at a certain mixture (through which it must pass to disperse) it becomes combustible. It may easily ignite, possibly from a self- generated spark, and cause a fire. Sometimes in the small quantities used in experiments, it has not exploded; sometimes it has. The enormous variety of types of

LNG carrier being built suggests that there is not quite a s much agreement about safety or efficiency among designers and operators as one would wish. It is fair to say of the LNG industry that it is at that particularly dangerous stage where it is expanding very rapidly and a large number of techniques are being used without any backing of long term testing or experience. The state of the market is such that some charterers of ordinary tankers have contemplated using them for carrying LNG. As the first report of the government 's Advisory Committee on Major Hazards put it: "Because of their present-day size . . . there are now many plants through- out the world where a critical first mistake can result in disaster".6

For plants, read liquefaction plant in the North Sea and LNG carriers. Note further that the stranding of large vessels in the Channel is not uncommon; that ports have to be fitted out especially to receive LNG carriers; that even with the proper equipment unloading takes twenty-four hours; that jettisoning of such cargoes is extremely hazardous; and that 35°7o of annual costs go on insurance.

In 1975, the world was using 15.6 billion m' of natural gas; in 1985, the figure is likely to be 90 billion m 3, perhaps more, and most of it in the US, Japan and Western Europe. The number of large LNG carriers is likely to more than double, which means that early and perhaps unsatisfactory designs will continue in use. LNG will be coming to ports in France, Belgium, Holland and West Germany from Iran, Algeria and Libya, and the 40:40:20: shipping repartition system is likely to come into use. LNG carriers now come right up into major ports: the occasion is not forgotten when the Tower Princess, on automatic pilot because the master, after 2Vz days without sleep, was in his bunk below, collided with a moored methane tanker in the Thames. As the Minister answering questions about it in Parliament said: " the incident was potentially very dangerous". The master of the Tower Princess was fined £150. As to accidents with LNG in the United States, in one 128 people died when a tank leaked and the vapour caught fire; in another, when an empty tank was being cleaned, there was an explosion and 40 workers were killed. These both occurred on land, and involved stationary objects. Nor will the case be for- gotton of the Yuyo Mama, a Japanese naph tha /LPG carrier, which, after a collision with a small cargo vessel in Tokyo Bay, caught fire. Flames and black smoke reached 300 m and " the whole neighbouring sea area was wrapped in flames". The fire could not be put out and the ship, having been towed out to sea, sank after nineteen days. In April this year a natural gas liquids plant in Qutar was 'devastated' by an explosion v thought to have been caused by a storage tank fracturing and releasing a cloud of gas. The US Office of Technology Assessment has now produced a report drawing atten- tion to the major hazards LNG presents and making recommendations.8

What then? Four things are needed, and the Composite Negotiat-

ing Text should be altered to accommodate them. (1) The coastal state must have adequate jurisdiction over all vessels carrying dangerous cargoes travelling through its

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waters. An international licensing system for vessels carrying cargoes internationally designated dangerous would make this possible, without genuinely innocent passage being impeded in any way. The licensed would enjoy the right of innocent passage through territorial waters and of free transit through international straits: The unlicensed would not. 'Dangerous cargoes' would be probably all those the dumping of which is subject to regulation. Casualties are often only a form of involuntary dumping, which is no less harmful than illegal voluntary dumping. (2) The flag state must take financial responsibility for dealing with dangerous casualties and de facto dumping. The licensing system should include compulsory insurance for third party risks. If the premiums are found to be inconveniently high, the insurance industry will be performing one of its most useful functions, that of demonstrating that the risks being taken are themselves uneconomically high. (3) If, as is certainly desirable, only internationally agreed rules are to be applied by coastal states in the waters for which they are responsible, much swifter methods for reaching international agreements and putting them into force must be devised. The 1969 Amendments to the

Marine Pollution Bulletin

1954 Convention on Oil Pollution are only coming into force in 1978. The gap between adoption and entry into force is widening, and should be reduced. The system of 'tacit agreement' within a fixed (and short) period should be adopted, and should itself be allowed to enter into force at once. (4) Whenever an international convention (or domestic legislation) mentions oil pollution, the text should be examined to see if it should not be amended to cover the other nasty cargoes as well.

1. There is a small Anglo-American agreement regulating the US nuclear-powered vessel Savannah when in British territorial waters and approaching a British port. British ports lend to refuse cntrance to nuclear-powered vessels.

2. Accidental Oil Pollution of the Sea. Dept. of the Environment Central Unit on Environmental Pollution, Pollution Paper No. 8. p. 125. Possible pollution problems deriving from the carriage at sea of radioactive cargoes, apart from radioactive waste intended for dumping, are not mentioned in this paper.

3. 15 January 1975. US; ACDA text. p. 13. 4. Reuters; lnternationaIHerald Tribune, 9 September 1977. 5. Facing the Problems of the Future, Reprinted in the Nautical

Review, No. 1, Vol. 7, March/Apri l 1977. 6. Report of the Advisory Commit tee on Major Hazards, 1976, p. 9. 7. The Times, 8 November 1977. 8. New Scientist, 27 October 1977.

Nearshore Sediment Pollution in Israel by Trace Metals Derived from Sewage Effluent A. J. AMIEL and J. NAVROT Department of Soil and Water Science, Hebrew University o f Jerusalem, Rehovot, Israel

Sediments along the Israeli coast were examined to determine the effects of large scale dumping o f sewage on trace metal contents. The Tel Aviv-Yafo sewage pipeline outlet is the largest point source of sewage effluent along the coast .

Significant quantities of trace meta l s - -Ag , Co, Cr, Cu, Hg, Ni, Pb and Z n - - w e r e found in sediments extending to a distance as far as 400 m from the sewage pipeline outlet. Beyond this point, sufficient dilution occurs to limit contaminat ion by sewage to relatively low levels at present. In the contaminated area, there are seasonable variations with maximum trace metal con- centrations occurring in the summer. The upper layers of the cores contain a greater trace metal burden than do the lower.

The main industrial cities of Israel are situated along the Mediterranean coast, and this concentration of popula- tion and industries exerts strong ecological pressures on the area. One very significant aspect of chemical pollu- tion is that due to trace metals. The most obvious point

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of concern is the Tel Aviv-Yafo region, in which the sewage pipeline (at Reading Power Station) spills raw sewage into the sea.

In a report of the Water Planning Company of Israel (Saleternick & Suaid, 1971) it is noted that sewage from the Reading pipeline contains trace metals which may be present in concentrations a thousand times their normal values in the ocean. The data indicates, for example, that cadmium is present at levels that would be sufficient to induce testicular injury in certain fish (Sangalang & O'Halloran, 1972); while the copper contained in these sewage waters exceeds that amount which is lethal for such fish as trout, pickerel and goldfish. Therefore, in addition to the aesthetic and bacteriological aspects of pollution, chemical aspects must be considered.

In the current study, we investigated how sea sedi- ments are affected by the sewage-induced trace metals. A primary concern was to find out if dispersion and dilution occur sufficiently rapidly to obviate any ill effects of trace metal contamination; if the release of pollutants is regulated so as to protect the ocean system,