Radioactive water from UK nuclear bomb base leaked into sea, files show | Nuclear waste

Radioactive water from the base that keeps nuclear bombs in the United Kingdom was allowed to flee in the sea after the old pipes broke out several times, official files revealed.

The radioactive material has been released in Loch Long, a sea lock near Glasgow in the west of Scotland, because the Royal Navy failed to maintain a network of 1,500 water pipes on the base, found a regulator.

The Coulport Armaments deposit on Loch Long is one of the safest and most secret military sites in the United Kingdom. It holds the supply of the Royal Navy to nuclear warheads for its fleet of four trident submarines, which are based nearby.

The files compiled by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA), a dog watchdog on pollution, suggest that up to half of the base components were beyond their design life when leaks occurred.

SEPA said that the flood in Coulport was caused by “maintenance gaps”, resulting in the release of “unnecessary radioactive waste” in the form of low tritium levels, which is used in nuclear warheads.

In a report in 2022, the agency blamed leaks on the repeated failure of the navy to maintain the equipment in the area dedicated to the storage of warheads, and said that the replacement plans of 1,500 old in danger were “sub-optimal”.

The leaks are revealed in a cache of confidential inspection reports and e-mails given to the website of the Ferret investigation and shared with the Guardian, that SEPA and the Ministry of Defense fought to remain secret.

They were released on the orders of David Hamilton, the Scottish Information Commissioner, who polished the Laws on Freedom of Information of Scotland, after a six -year battle by journalists to access the files.

The British government insisted that the files had to be kept secret for reasons of national security, but in June, Hamilton judged that most had to be released. He said their disclosure threatened “reputation” and not national security.

They were released in August following another delay after the MOD asked for more time to review them, citing “additional national security considerations”.

Nuclear warheads are installed on the United Kingdom’s supply of trident missiles to Coulport where missiles are loaded with Vanguard class submarines before going to sea for secret patrols as part of the UK nuclear deterrence.

The Nuclear weapons fleet of the United Kingdom has been based in Faslane on a neighboring loch called Loch station since the early 1960s. Tritium has been regularly reconstructed in the warheads to maintain the performance of weapons.

SEPA files show that there had been a burst of pipes in Coulport in 2010 and two others in 2019. A leak in August 2019 released “large quantities of water” which flooded a processing area of nuclear weapons, where it became contaminated by low tritium levels and crossed an open drain which fueled Loch Long.

While SEPA said that the levels of radioactivity in this incident were very low and did not endanger human health, it revealed that there were “maintenance and asset management deficits which led to the failure of the coupling which indirectly led to the production of unnecessary radioactive waste”.

After an internal investigation and an inspection of SEPA, the MOD promised 23 actions to prevent more gusts and floods in March 2020. He accepted that his lack of preparation had caused a “confusion”, “a break in access control” and a “lack of communication of dangers”.

However, there were two other gusts of pipes in 2021, one of which was in another region which also held radioactive substances, which caused another SEPA inspection in 2022. The progress of the completion of the 23 repair actions “had been slow and delayed in many cases,” said SEPA. “Events have highlighted the gaps in the management of assets through the naval base.”

David Cullen, an expert in nuclear weapons from Defense Thinktank Basic in London, said that repeated pollution incidents were shocking and that attempts to keep secret were “scandalous”.

He said: “The MOD is almost 10 years in an infrastructure program of nearly 2 billion pounds Sterling in Faslan and Coulport, and yet they apparently did not have an appropriate asset management system as recently as 2022. This negligent approach is far too common in the nuclear weapon program, and is a direct consequence of a lack of surveillance.”

Coulport is exempt from civil pollution controls because it is a military base, but SEPA said that it was determined to guarantee that the base operated “in accordance with standards equivalent to those in environmental regulation, to protect both the environment and the public”.

SEPA said it was “satisfied” that Coulport and Faslane had made “substantial improvements to the management and maintenance of assets” from these incidents, which had not been repeated.

Each year, it has published data on the radioactive discharges of Coulport and Faslane, as well as assessments of environmental impacts. He insisted that these discharges were “without regulatory concern”.

A MOD spokesman said he had placed “the greatest importance on our responsibilities to manage radioactive substances in complete safety and safe. There was no delivery of dangerous radioactive materials in the environment at any stage. ”