from The Guardian, 11 October 2011
Floods or earthquakes could cause radioactivity to leak into the environment from Britain’s nuclear bomb factories, the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) has admitted.
In a submission to the Fukushima safety review led by the government’s chief nuclear inspector, Dr Mike Weightman, published today, AWE said that some of the sensitive operations carried out at Aldermaston and Burghfield in Berkshire were “vulnerable” to flooding or seismic damage.
Burghfield was badly flooded after heavy rain on 20 July 2007, which an internal AWE report said caused severe disruption and “extensive damage” to an explosives area. But the report stressed that there was no “threat to the nuclear safety of either the AWE sites, the public or the environment.”
Now, however, in a 40-page submission to the Weightman review by the Office for Nuclear Regulation, AWE accepts that radioactivity could escape. “Some containment may be vulnerable to flooding in which case some limited spread of radiological contamination could occur,” it said.
This would be “a minor consequence event”, AWE added. “Some containment (process and structures) may be vulnerable to damage from a seismic event. There could be particulate release as a result of loss of containment or fire.”
AWE said it was “considering further the potential impact of co-incident events” in the light of the earthquake and tsunami that triggered the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March this year.
The AWE submission also disclosed that it was dependent on electricity from the national grid in the event of emergencies. Power failure was one of the compounding factors that caused the Fukushima accident.
As a result of a review, “the on site electricity distribution system is to be enhanced over the coming year”, AWE said. “This enhancement will remove any nuclear safety dependency on the national grid.”
It added: “These enhancements also allow for AWE to generate electricity to serve the emergency response facilities and to monitor the key nuclear facilities. Whilst it is believed this situation could be sustained for a sufficiently long period of time a review will be carried out to assess the possible time frame that this capability could be maintained.”
AWE is a consortium of three private companies contracted by the Ministry of Defence to maintain Britain’s Trident nuclear warheads and design any replacements. One of the companies, Serco, also made a submission to the Weightman review.
It warned that a combination of events severe enough to disable offsite and onsite power as at Fukushima “could well be severe enough to disable a complex engineered solution.”
This could also affect storage locations for equipment, Serco said. “Thus the normal UK approach, of having an engineered solution, might not be effective."
Peter Burt, from the Nuclear Information Service, which monitors the nuclear weapons industry, said it had been "passed over" by the Weightman review. "The military nuclear programme is almost certainly the area within the UK's nuclear sector which poses the greatest risks, yet it receives virtually no scrutiny," he argued.
"The defence secretary, Liam Fox, must explain exactly what steps are being taken to ensure that the Ministry of Defence's nuclear sites, weapons, and submarine reactors comply with the safety standards that the Weightman review recommends."
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