Britain covered up radioactive water leak from secret submarine base into sea for 6 years - The Guardian

Britain covered up radioactive water leak from secret submarine base into sea for 6 years in Scotland, at Coalport base on Loch Long. This is reported by The Guardian.

According to documents, radioactive water from a British nuclear base leaked into the sea near Glasgow because the Royal Navy failed to maintain 1,500 water pipes, notifies the supervisory authority. The regulator found that radioactive material entered Loch Long, located near Glasgow in western Scotland, because the Royal Navy failed to properly maintain a network of 1,500 water pipes at the base.

The weapons depot at Coalport on Loch Long is one of the most protected and secret military sites in the UK. It houses the Royal Navy's stockpile of nuclear warheads for the four Trident submarines based nearby.

According to documents compiled by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa), the government's pollution control body, almost half of the components at the base had already passed their design life at the time of the leaks. Sepa said the flooding at Coalport was caused by "maintenance deficiencies" that led to the release of "unnecessary radioactive waste" in the form of small amounts of tritium, which is used in nuclear warheads.

In a 2022 report, the agency blamed the leaks on the Navy's repeated failure to maintain equipment in the warhead storage area and said plans to replace 1,500 aging pipes that were at risk of bursting were "suboptimal." The leak was discovered in a cache of confidential inspection reports and emails shared with the investigative website Ferret and given to the Guardian, which Sepa and the Ministry of Defence had sought to keep secret.

The documents were released at the behest of David Hamilton, the Scottish Information Commissioner who oversees compliance with Scottish freedom of information laws, after a six-year battle by journalists to gain access to the files. The UK government had insisted the files should be classified on national security grounds, but in June, Hamilton ruled that most of them should be released. He said their disclosure was a "reputational" risk, not a national security one.

The Sepa documents show that there was a pipe burst in Coalport in 2010 and two more in 2019. One of the leaks in August 2019 caused a significant amount of water to flood a nuclear weapons production site, where it was contaminated with small amounts of tritium and flowed through an open drain into Loch Long.

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