Radioactive water from a base that houses the nuclear bombs of the United Kingdom has been allowed to drain in the sea. The government wanted to keep the secret incident
HMS Vengeance nuclear nuclear submarine at the HM Naval Base Ctyde, belane. Credit Line: Jane Barlow, Pa Images / Alamy / Profimedia
The radioactive material was discharged into Loch Long, a marine lake located near Glasgow, in the west of Scotland, because the Royal Marina did not properly maintain the water pipeline network from a nuclear base, shows the documents of a regulatory authority, according to The Guardian.
The Coulpport's weapon warehouse is one of the safest military sites in the UK. It holds the nuclear reserve of the royal navy for its four trident submarines fleet.
Documents compiled by the Scottish Agency for Environmental Protection (SEPE), a government -supervised government body, suggest that up to half of the base components had exceeded the designed life when leakage took place.
SEPA said that the discharges from Coulport were caused by “maintenance deficiencies”, which led to the release of “unnecessary radioactive waste” in the form of low levels of tritium, which is used in nuclear focos.
In a report from 2022, the agency blames the sea to leak to maintain the equipment in the area dedicated to storage of foci and said that the plans for the replacement of 1,500 old pipes that risk breaking are “suboptimals”.
The government wanted to keep the secret incident
The leaks are revealed in a series of confidential inspection reports and emails provided to The Ferret's investigation site and shared with The Guardian, which SEPA and the Ministry of Defense have tried to keep secrets.
They were made public at the order of David Hamilton, the Scottish Commissioner for information, who supervises the observance of the Scottish laws regarding the freedom of information, after a six -year fight for reporters for access to files.
The British government insisted that the files should be kept secret for national security reasons, but in June Hamilton decided that most should be made public. He stated that their disclosure threatens “reputation”, not national security.
They were made public in August, after an additional delay, because the Ministry of Defense requested more time to examine them, invoking “additional national security considerations”.
The nuclear focus are mounted on the trident rockets of the United Kingdom at Coulport, where the rockets are loaded on the submarines of the Vanguard class before leaving for secret patrols, as part of the Nuclear Discourage Strategy of the United Kingdom.
According to The Guardian, the Fleet of Nuclear Weapons of the United Kingdom is based on Faslane, on a neighboring lake called Gare Loch, since the early 1960s. The triti is regularly renewed in the foci to maintain the weapon performance.
People's health was not endangered
SEPA files show that a pipe break was breaking in Coulport in 2010 and two more in 2019. A drainage from August 2019 issued “significant amounts of water” that flooded a nuclear weapon processing area, where it was contaminated with low levels and passed through an open channel that was poured into Loch Long.
Although SEPA stated that radioactivity levels in that incident were very low and did not endanger human health, it found that there were “maintenance deficiencies and managing the assets that led to the breakdown of the coupling, which indirectly led to the production of useless radioactive waste.”
After an internal investigation and a separate inspection, the Ministry of Defense promised 23 measures to prevent other explosions and floods in March 2020. He acknowledged that his lack of training caused “confusion”, “a failure of access control” and “lack of danger communication”.
