from The Guardian, 31 March 2010
Nuclear submarines have been using berths around the British coast despite the revelation of serious doubts about the safety of people living nearby in a secret Ministry of Defence review, seen by the Guardian.
The MoD’s internal watchdog, the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator (DNSR), condemned the safety plans drawn up by the Royal Navy to protect coastal communities from accidents as flawed, inaccurate and outdated.
The plans would fail to protect people from radioactive leaks from submarine reactors, significantly misstated the likelihood of a major accident, and in some places did not take account of the risk of collisions with cruise liners and commercial shipping, DNSR said.
The revelations have prompted calls from campaigners for a ban on submarines using the berths, and fears that ports risk “indefinite contamination” from accidents. The MoD said the problems have been “addressed” but gave no details of any measures taken.
There are designated berths for Britain's 12 nuclear submarines in eight locations. Most are at three naval bases: Devonport near Plymouth, Portsmouth in Hampshire, and at Faslane and Coulport on the Clyde near Glasgow. There are also berths in Southampton, on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, in the middle of the Firth of Clyde and to the north on Loch Goil. More remotely, there is a berth on Loch Ewe on the north-west coast of Scotland.
Under government regulations introduced after the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986, nuclear submarine berths have to be covered by a safety plan. This includes “hazard identification and risk evaluation” and measures such as evacuation, sheltering and the distribution of anti-radiation pills to protect people from radioactive leakages,
The secret review of these safety plans conducted by the DNSR for Navy commanders in July 2008 has now been released by the MoD under freedom of information law, and passed to The Guardian.
Its conclusions are damning. The plans “do not fully provide the level of safety substantiation expected,” the DNSR report said. “No case is made that risks are ALARP [as low as reasonably practicable].”
The plans conclude that the berths present no unexpected hazards, but “it is not clear that the analysis presented can sustain such a conclusion,” the report added.
The probability of a serious accident at the berths in southern England has been “misstated” by a factor of 10, it revealed, though it is unclear if this is an over- or underestimate. There were “difficulties in the descriptions of the control of commercial shipping” in Portsmouth, Southampton and the Firth of Clyde.
Although submarine visits to the Isle of Portland were timed to avoid the risk of collisions with passenger cruise liners and the use of a prison ship, “this is not the case at Southampton,” the DNSR report said.
In some places emergency arrangements had not been tested “for many years”, the report disclosed. Local population data was sometimes "outdated" and meteorological information was “similarly outdated and unsystematic”.
Account was not taken of the difficulties of accessing places like the Isle of Portland and Loch Ewe, the report said. “Mapping is frequently not adequate to provide an appreciation of the surrounding area.”
It noted there were “numerous editorial errors and other shortfalls” including “frequent mismatches between detailed population data”, as well as “inconsistencies” in the descriptions of the conditions of submarine reactors.
“The discussion of fire hazards in particular at Southampton and Portsmouth is trivial and unsourced. The conclusions presented in the safety statements for Southampton and Portsmouth are particularly weak.”
Despite these problems, the report concluded: “DNSR does not consider it appropriate to challenge the extant regulatory consent to use the UK operational berths.” Instead there was a “regulatory expectation” that the next set of safety plans to be submitted in 2011 would be “significantly improved”. The DNSR operates within the MOD and, other than FOI requests, does not make its work public, nor does it answer directly inquiries from journalists.
The report was obtained by John Large, an independent nuclear engineer who advises governments on the safety of nuclear submarines. “This is a totally unacceptable nuclear safety situation,” he said. “It defies belief that the MoD’s internal regulator can find so many problems with the safety plans, but then turn a Nelsonian blind eye. Such is the muddle, inadequacies and lack of preparation that these nuclear berths should not be permitted to operate under any circumstances.”
A major accident involving a submarine reactor could cause a cloud of radioactivity to be blown over nearby communities, putting the health of ten of thousands of people at risk, Large warned.
Last year the DNSR, along with the government’s Health and Safety Executive, reduced the size of emergency zones around submarine berths. The radius within which they judged members of the public were likely to be affected by a “reasonably foreseeable radiation emergency” was lowered from two to 1.5 kilometres.
This infuriated local groups, who argued there was no technical justification for the change. “We find these revelations alarming as they back up our own assessment that the so-called safety plan is deeply flawed,” said David Hoadley, chair of the Solent Coalition Against Nuclear Ships in Southampton. The populations of Southampton and other ports were at risk of “indefinite contamination” from these “mobile reactors” in the heart of their cities, he claimed.
The MoD insisted that it was committed to maintaining the safety of its operational berths and the neighbouring communities. “That is why regulators carry out such strict checks,” said a MoD spokeswoman. “Any concerns which were raised by inspections in 2008 have been addressed and regulators are happy with the current safety management arrangements.”
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