Throughout the year there has been continuing activity to initiate collaborative research in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone with the International Radioecology Lab (IRL) in the Ukraine. Nigel Bell is on the IRL Advisory Board, and he and a number of other COGER members attended a conference about Chernobyl in September 2000 and visited IRL. After considering a number of funding possibilities, it was decided that COGER should take the lead in bringing people together to prepare an outline bid for an NERC consortium grant. A workshop to discuss this was held in London in December 2000, and following that an outline was sent to NERC. Following feedback, the bid is being refined and will go forward to NERC in the near future. It is important to mention here that while COGER facilitated the preparation of the funding bid to NERC, it is not formally involved with the application, which is now the responsibility of the individual scientists making the proposal.

The 2000 COGER meeting was held on 4-6 September at the University of Southampton with Phil Warwick acting as local organiser. The meeting was very well attended (50+ participants). There were 25 oral presentations and a large number of posters. All in all it was another very successful meeting, and we are hopeful that the 2001 meeting in London will be even better! The highlight of the Southampton meeting was the COGER Lecture given by Eric Hamilton, who was a pioneer in the UK in the area of environmental radioactivity research. His reflections on his 50 years of involvement with the subject were both informative and entertaining, particularly his experiences in the very early days when his ingenuity was a key ingredient in his success - ingenuity is not a trait that is particularly highly prized in the current scientific environment.

Note: The 2002 COGER meeting will be held jointly with CAPER (NERC's Air Pollution group) at the University of Bradford on 8-10 April. A planning session will be held with CAPER during their 2001 meeting at Heriot Watt in March 2001.