THE beach at Dalgety Bay contaminated with radiation may not be cleaned up by the target date of September 2022.

Stephen Ritchie, from the Ministry of Defence (MoD), admitted it was now “50/50” as to whether the work to remove hazardous material from the foreshore will be completed on schedule after the £10 million project was beset by delays.

The stretch of coastline at Dalgety Bay is polluted with radioactive debris from old aircraft instrument panels and a remediation plan has been in the pipeline for many years.

Those efforts finally got under way in May, more than a year after planned originally.

The project has now paused as work is only able to take place between April and September because of migrating birds that spend the winter at Dalgety Bay.

At the South and West Fife area committee last week, Mr Ritchie told councillors that the project timescales should become clearer in the spring.

“Are we as confident as we were at the beginning of last year that the work will be completed by the end of September? We feel that it’s probably 50/50,” he said.

“We reckon we can get through the work a lot faster than we have done over the last year and the understanding between our contractor Balfour Beatty and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) has improved greatly.

“But I’ve got to be honest and say the first two months of the new window will be critical as to whether we meet that date or not."

“We need to assess the rate at which we’re getting through the remediation process and we can only do that at the end of April, start of May.”

The contamination on the town's beach was discovered by accident in 1990 and came from dials in Second World War planes that were coated with a luminous paint – later found to contain radium -226 – to help pilots and navigators read the instruments at night.

The planes were broken up and burned at Donibristle Airfield in the 1950s and the resultant ash and clinker dumped along the shore, around a decade before the development of the town.

Thousands of radioactive particles have been found on the shore since 1990, though most pose a low risk to public health.

Previous attempts to tackle the pollution were hampered by disagreement between the MoD, SEPA and Fife Council over who was responsible.

The MoD was named formally as the polluter by SEPA but the clean-up continued to be delayed.

Work which started in May includes replacing rock armour around the headland and installing a new slipway for the Dalgety Bay Sailing Club.

At the committee meeting in September, Mr Ritchie had conceded: “The contractor, it’s fair to say, has not achieved the throughput of work that we anticipated and is behind the curve on delivering the project.”

If the target date is missed, the work would likely start again in April 2023.

Radioactive material discovered is being removed and taken to a facility near Huntingdon, south of the border.

Once remediation has been completed and verified by SEPA, it is expected the public will get unrestricted access to the beach for the first time since 2011.