Radioactive Water From UK Nuclear Bomb Base Leaked Into Sea, Files Show
upstart writes:
Radioactive water from the base that holds the UK's nuclear bombs was allowed to leak into the sea after old pipes repeatedly burst, official files have revealed.
The radioactive material was released into Loch Long, a sea loch near Glasgow in western Scotland, because the Royal Navy failed to properly maintain a network of 1,500 water pipes on the base, a regulator found.
The armaments depot at Coulport on Loch Long is one of the most secure and secretive military sites in the UK. It holds the Royal Navy's supply of nuclear warheads for its fleet of four Trident submarines, which are based nearby.
Files compiled by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa), a government pollution watchdog, suggest that up to half the components at the base were beyond their design life when the leaks occurred.
Sepa said the flooding at Coulport was caused by "shortfalls in maintenance", resulting in the release of "unnecessary radioactive waste" in the form of low levels of tritium, which is used in nuclear warheads.
In one report in 2022, the agency blamed the leaks on the navy's repeated failure to maintain the equipment in the area devoted to storing the warheads, and said plans to replace 1,500 old pipes at risk of bursting were "sub-optimal".
The leaks are revealed in a cache of confidential inspection reports and emails given to the investigative website the Ferret and shared with the Guardian, which Sepa and the Ministry of Defence fought to keep secret.
[...] The Sepa files show there had been a pipe burst at Coulport in 2010 and a further two in 2019. One leak in August 2019 released "significant amounts of water" that flooded a nuclear weapons processing area, where it became contaminated with low levels of tritium and passed through an open drain that fed into Loch Long.
While Sepa said radioactivity levels in that incident were very low and did not endanger human health, it found there were "shortfalls in maintenance and asset management that led to the failure of the coupling that indirectly led to the production of unnecessary radioactive waste".
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