Exclusive, 18 April 2011
The reactors that power all Britain's nuclear submarines are twice as likely to suffer a catastrophic accident as US submarine reactors and civil nuclear power stations, according to a secret Ministry of Defence (MoD) report.
The pressurised water reactors, known as PWR2, are vulnerable to Fukushima-style loss of coolant accidents if they develop cracks larger than 15 millimetres. They also rely on manual cooling in an emergency, rather than a system that automatically injects coolant into the reactor.
These are the revelations that the MoD meant to censor from a report by its senior nuclear safety regulator, Commodore Andrew McFarlane. The report was released online in a form that enabled text that had been blacked out to be seen simply by cutting and pasting it into another document.
The censored text also reveals that British submariners are more likely to drown if the reactor fails while they are under water. UK submarines "accept a much lower reliability from the main propulsion system" and the back-up system "will not provide sufficient dynamic lift", it says.
When the MoD's mistake was reported yesterday, it said it "took steps to ensure the document was removed from the public domain". However, it was not removed from Google's online cache for about 24 hours, and so has been widely accessed.
The report, with the censored text revealed, is currently available on several websites, including www.largeassociates.com, banthebomb.org, nuclearinfo.org and crytome.org. It can also be downloaded here.
Read an earlier story about the Ministry of Defence report here.
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