from Sunday Herald, 24 April 2011
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has been accused of misleading MPs about the risks of the reactors that power Britain’s nuclear submarines suffering Fukushima-style accidents.
In a UK parliamentary answer earlier this month, the defence minister, Peter Luff, failed to respond directly to a question from the SNP’s defence spokesman, Angus Robertson, about the emergency cooling systems used on the submarines.
Instead Luff made a reassuring statement disguising the fact that the reactors have cooling systems that, according to a senior MoD safety expert, renders them vulnerable to a major loss-of-coolant accident.
It was the disabling of the back-up cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear plants in Japan by a tsunami that caused radioactive fuel to overheat and leak into the atmosphere. Over 70,000 people have had to be evacuated as a result.
“The MoD and nuclear industry are notorious for putting secrecy ahead of public safety, and this episode combines the worst of the two,” Robertson told the Sunday Herald. “It is unacceptable for ministers not to answer a straight parliamentary question, and for MPs to be misled in this way.”
Luff replied on 5 April 2011 that “all submarines in service with the Royal Navy have passive core cooling capability and the ability to add coolant into the reactor pressure vessel if necessary.”
But what Luff didn’t say was that there are no systems for automatically injecting coolant into the reactor. The lack of such systems was highlighted in a 2009 report by the MoD’s nuclear safety regulator, Andrew McFarlane, which the MoD has tried to keep secret.
McFarlane’s report was released under freedom of information law with large sections blacked out to try and prevent them from being read. But researchers discovered that the hidden text could be seen simply by cutting and pasting it into another document.
The MoD attempted to withdraw the report, but last week the secret text was widely posted on the internet. It revealed that, according to McFarlane, British submarines were twice as likely as US submarines and civil nuclear power stations to suffer loss-of-coolant accidents.
This was because British submarines had an emergency cooling system that “does not inject coolant to the reactor pressure vessel head, and is highly dependent on manual procedural control”, McFarlane said. There are currently 11 nuclear-powered submarines based at Faslane on the Clyde, including the newest, HMS Astute.
The nuclear consultant, John Large, who has advised governments on submarine reactor safety, argued that there was “no doubt” that MPs had been misled. “I am sure that submariners will not take kindly to the mealy mouthed words of the minister in evading public disclosure of the facts,” he said.
“It is absolutely vital that any coolant loss from the reactor is immediately and adequately made up. Not having a means of achieving this puts the Royal Navy’s current reactor designs at much higher risk of catastrophic failure.”
John Ainslie, the coordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, accused Luff of deliberately concealing a major design weakness in British submarines. The type of coolant system was critical, he said, because “it makes the difference between a minor mishap and a disaster like Fukushima.”
The MoD declined directly to answer the allegation that parliament had been misled. A spokesman stressed that all Britain’s submarine reactors met “extremely high” safety standards, and repeated the words about cooling systems used by Luff in the House of Commons.
McFarlane has retired as the MoD’s chief Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator since 2009 and been replaced by Commodore David Langbridge. “The report did not say that the current reactors are unsafe, and it would be entirely wrong to draw that conclusion from it,” Langbridge has said.
McFarlane’s report concluded that it would be “unacceptable” to use the current reactor design in the submarines being considered to replace those that carry Trident nuclear missiles. Though no final decision has been announced, it looks likely that they will use a reactor with an improved emergency cooling system.
The defence secretary, Liam Fox, has told the House of Commons there was a “very clear-cut” case to use a new reactor design because it has “improved nuclear safety” and would give “a better safety outlook”.
This story prompted a letter to the Sunday Herald from the Ministry of Defence, published on 1 May 2011, and then a letter from the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, published on 8 May 2011. Both letters are below.
Peter Luff, Minister for Defence Equipment Support and Technology, wrote:
"In last Sunday’s Herald (24 Apr), you reported that the MoD had been accused of misleading MPs regarding submarine reactor safety. I can assure you that this is simply not the case. I am personally committed, as are all my ministerial colleagues, to the principles of accuracy and honesty before Parliament that underpin our democracy. The MoD’s answer to the Parliamentary Question referred to in the article was entirely accurate.
"Royal Navy nuclear submarines have an outstanding safety record over nearly 50 years of submarine operations. We are determined to maintain this record and continue to seek further improvements wherever it is practicable to do so. All our submarines meet extremely stringent safety standards and this is closely monitored by the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator."
John Ainslie, Coordinator, Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, wrote:
"The Minister doth protest too much, methinks. Peter Luff has highlighted his own lack of transparency by earnestly declaring that nuclear submarines have an outstanding safety record (letters, 1 May). He has still not given an honest answer to the question posed by Angus Robertson – can coolant be injected directly into the head of the pressure vessel on submarine reactors?
"There are two reasonable ways the Defence Minister might have responded in Parliament. He could have said ‘no’. This, as an accidentally declassified report shows, would have been accurate. Alternatively, the minister could, on grounds of national security, have refused to answer the question. But Mr Luff chose a third approach. He said that coolant could be injected, without saying where. This left Parliament with the misleading impression that British submarines have this vital safety feature, which in fact they lack."
Comments