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Robots To Clear the Baltic Seafloor of WW-II Mines
An anonymous reader writes "A Russian company is building a massive natural gas pipeline that will run across the Baltic Sea floor. But first, they must clear some of the 150,000 unexploded bombs sitting at the bottom of the sea, left there by the Russian and German armies in the 1940s. About 70 of these mines, each filled with 300 kg of explosive charge, sit in the pipeline's path, mostly in its northern section just south of Finland. And so the company contracted to remove the mines is bringing in robots to do the dirty work. Here's how it will work: A research ship deploys the robot to the seabed, where it identifies the exact location of the explosive. After sounding a warning to surrounding ship traffic, scaring fish away using a small explosive, and then emitting a 'seal screamer' of high intensity noises designed to make the area around the blast quite uncomfortable for marine mammals, Bactec's engineers erupt a 5 kg blast, forcing the mine to detonate. This process ensures the safety of humans plus any animals living in the surrounding environment. The operation concludes with the robot being redeployed to clear up the scrap of the now-destroyed bomb."
Any pollution from the remains of these mines would only be temporary, the sea claims all things in the end and it will eventually filter out/destroy toxins on its own once its in flow is stopped.
Conservation of mass is still the rule of the land. Pollution doesn't "disappear" it just dilutes. That being said, from my memory of a week of hands on US army explosives training in the early 90s as an ammo specialist 55B:
1) All unexploded military grade explosives are somewhat toxic. In the movies, or during wartime, people mush C-4 with their bare hands, but its quite poisonous so we wore gloves in training. We were told you'll throw up in the short term, and get cancer in the long term. Best case is probably ANFO, the AN is harmless, but the FO part is literally pouring raw diesel fuel into the water, not all that nice of a thing to do. Just touching nitro dynamite gives an amazing headache, the RDX stuff is way better but still not exactly baby formula. TNT is oily gritty semisolid stuff that partially liquifies when its warm, probably not an issue in the baltic sea...
There are explosives that are non toxic like gunpowder that are not used as a military explosive but only as a propellant in naval guns (modern ones use nitro based smokeless powders). There are exotic mining explosives vaguely involving charcoal and liquid oxygen, which are not used by the military.
2) Generally speaking, the fumes/smoke/whatever of an explosive are WAY less toxic than the explosive itself. Given the choice of breathing the smoke from 1 lb of TNT, or eating 1 lb of TNT, the smoke is WAY more healthy. The smoke from C-4 is nasty and will kill you, but eating or touching unexploded C-4 will kill you WAY faster. The environment is way better off with the stuff exploded than unexploded.
3) Pest control was not an issue in the bunkers, as far as I know, aside from termites in the crates. Unexploded ammo is not good eats.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
No, they were dumped there after the war, and not just normal bombs but chemical ones as well. Common practice at the time.
Germany had large stockpiles of these (including neurotoxic ones), but they feared if they used them the allies would use them too. Hitler was temporarily blinded in WWI by chemical warfare, so that might have played a role.
Nobody wanted to look after or defuse these, so they just dumped them in the Baltic sea.