Rob Edwards

Revealed: 15 military sites contaminated by radioactivity

from The Guardian, 20 December 2011

At least 15 sites across the UK have been contaminated by radioactivity from Second World War military activities, according to new disclosures by the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

A dozen of the sites, which include current and former air and naval bases, have not been identified before by the MoD. Some are accessible by the public or being developed for homes or businesses, though the potential risks are unclear.

The contamination comes from radium that was used to coat the dials of aircraft and other equipment so that they could be seen in the dark. It was in scrap burnt and dumped in the 1940s and 1950s, and remains radioactive for thousands of years.

The contaminated sites include the old SAS headquarters at Stirling Lines in Hereford, a former naval air base near Portsmouth, a previous home to the Red Arrows in Gloucestershire and a former RAF base at Machrihanish on the Mull of Kintyre (see table below).

The MoD has revealed the list of sites in response to a series of freedom of information requests in the wake of the discovery of dangerous levels of radium contamination at Dalgety Bay in Fife. It was home to a busy Second World War air base.

Nuclear reactor shut by storm

19 December 2011

The picture that dominated media coverage of the fierce storms earlier this month was a wind turbine bursting into flames. But at the same time one of Scotland’s nuclear reactors had to be closed down.

A 460-megawatt reactor at Hunterston in North Ayrshire was shut for two days because of a problem with local power lines caused by high winds. Critics point out that the burning wind turbine was designed to generate just one megawatt.

Hunterston’s operator, EDF Energy, said the reactor came offline on 8 December and was returned to power on 10 December. “It went off because of a fault on the national grid and not as a result of any problem with plant equipment,” said an EDF spokeswoman.

According to the National Grid company, storm force winds caused the 400,000-volt electricity transmission line owned by Scottish Power between substations at Hunterston and Inverkip to trip.

“This resulted in the disconnection of one of the generating units at Hunterston power station that feeds into the high-voltage transmission network at Hunterston substation,” said a company spokesman.

Scotland is neglecting its parks and woods, survey reveals

from Sunday Herald, 11 December 2011

They are vital for our health, our life and our sanity, but they are now in sharp decline because of government cutbacks.

The parks, gardens, allotments, woodlands and sports fields that make up urban Scotland’s vital green spaces are deteriorating fast, according to dramatic new evidence to be unveiled tomorrow.

A survey conducted for the independent social enterprise, Greenspace Scotland, reveals a steep drop in the number of people using their local green spaces over the last two years. This is because they are seen as more stressful, less attractive and more dangerous places now than they were in 2009.

This means that Scotland is putting public health and economic prosperity at risk, experts warn. The survey should act as a “wake-up call” for policy-makers to protect and enhance the quality of green spaces rather than allow them to suffer from funding restrictions, they say.

“We’ve been hearing about reductions in green space staffing and management which inevitably were going to make a difference on the ground, but we hadn’t expected this to impact so soon on people’s use and attitudes,” said Julie Procter, the chief executive of Greenspace Scotland.

UK government shared intelligence with nuclear industry, documents show

from The Guardian, 05 December 2011

The British government has been quietly exchanging intelligence on key policies with multinational companies in an effort to protect and promote their plans for new nuclear power stations, according to internal documents seen by the Guardian.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has also passed the Nuclear Industry Association (NIA), which represents 260 companies, and the French nuclear company, EDF Energy, details of its court battle against Greenpeace, which is trying to block the nuclear plans.

The leakage of information has been condemned by Greenpeace as an "abuse of power" which prevents democratic scrutiny. The environmental group's lawyers have written to the government and high court in London complaining that the proper legal procedures have been breached.

The government is planning to build eight new nuclear power stations in England and Wales and there is a perception that the government has been working closely with the nuclear industry to manage public opinion and prevent a backlash against the technology as has happened in Germany and Italy.

Internal emails revealed by the Guardian in June showed that British government officials approached nuclear companies to draw up a co-ordinated public relations strategy to play down the Fukushima nuclear accident just two days after the earthquake and tsunami in Japan in March.

In the latest revelations, a minute of a meeting on 15 September between officials from Decc's Office for Nuclear Development (OND) and EDF reveals that they shared information about the handling of the company's application to build the first of the new nuclear stations at Hinkley Point in Somerset, and much else.

Revealed: the dangerous radioactivity that the MoD missed

from Sunday Herald, 04 December 2011

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is facing a ferocious barrage of criticism for botching its monitoring of Dalgety Bay so badly that it missed more than 400 radioactive hotspots, including some of the most lethal ever found on public beaches.

Former government experts, current government advisors and senior politicians have condemned the MoD’s monitoring of the contaminated Fife foreshore as inadequate, ineffectual and incompetent. According to one of the MoD’s own former radiation scientists, the ministry can no longer be trusted to do the job – though it must pay for it.

“Because of MoD’s failure to properly assess the extent and risks from the contamination, any further surveys or assessments should not be carried out by MoD, or MoD contractors,” said Fred Dawson, who worked for the MoD for 31 years before he left as head of the radiation protection policy team in 2009.

“Nor should MoD, or MoD contractors, be allowed to participate or undertake remediation work. MoD’s role should be limited to providing the necessary finance to remediate the beach.”

Dawson accused the MoD of being persistently blind to the seriousness of the pollution. “It has consistently done all that it can to avoid admitting liability for the contamination, which in all probability it caused,” he told the Sunday Herald.

Time for the Ministry of Defence to pay up

Comment from Sunday Herald, 04 December 2011

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) is turning prevarication into an art form. There are, it seems, few tricks, evasions and deceits that it won’t deploy to try and wriggle out of responsibility for cleaning up the radioactive mess it has made at Dalgety Bay in Fife.

As we report today, its monitoring of the contaminated foreshore in September missed more than 400 radioactive hotspots. Like Admiral Nelson back in 1801, the ministry’s modern-day commanders turned a blind eye in the hope that the problem would disappear.

MoD officials have also suggested that a decision to end monitoring could be kept quiet by the simple device of not telling the media. They have disputed clear evidence from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) that young children use the beach, with one MoD official telling a meeting in October that “a toddler would not be crawling about the bay”.

At the same meeting officials repeatedly refused to accept responsibility for paying for the clean-up. “MoD need to consider any cost-benefit of any remediation,” said one. “The cost-benefit analysis may suggest it is better to leave the beach closed.”