The UK's nuclear programme- an accident waiting to happen?

 
Peter Burt of the Nuclear Information Service (pictured) argues that the UK's military nuclear programme should be subject to a rigorous safety review following the Fukushima emergency.
 
 
Although the Fukushima nuclear emergency is no longer in the news, the consequences of the incident continue to echo around the world. 
 
Fukushima has raised key questions about whether emergency planning arrangements are adequate to deal with a serious and prolonged nuclear accident. The emergency planning community has been frantically reviewing and revising plans and contingency measures in the light of lessons learnt in Japan.
 
In the UK the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) has reviewed the implications of the Fukushima emergency for the UK's nuclear industry, with emergency planning featuring prominently. 
 
The HSE review, undertaken by Mike Weightman, the Chief Inspector of Nuclear Installations, recommended that, in light of experiences at Fukushima, the government should review both the Japanese government's response and the UK's own national nuclear emergency arrangements.
 
While emergency arrangements in the civil nuclear sector are facing long-overdue scrutiny as a result of Fukushima, the UK's military nuclear programme has so far remained out of the spotlight. 
 
This should set alarm bells ringing, as the Ministry of Defence's nuclear programme is subject to fewer safeguards, weaker regulation, and far less transparency than the civil nuclear sector. 
 
A number of recent incidents and emergency exercises have highlighted worries about how effective the response to an accident involving a nuclear weapon or nuclear submarine reactor would be.
 
In August 2010 a fire broke out in a building containing high explosives at the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) site at Aldermaston, where the UK's nuclear weapons are designed and manufactured. 
 
An inquiry into the fire has identified a number of concerns about the response to the fire, including “a general inadequacy of knowledge of facility emergency plans, safe routes, pre-operation briefing, equipment location and preparation, length of working day, adherence to Standard Operating Procedures and out of normal working hours manning levels”.
 
A debriefing report about the AWE fire prepared by the Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service states that “numerous difficulties” were experienced by agencies involved in responding to the emergency because of the security status of the AWE Aldermaston site and the time of day the fire broke out. 
 
AWE's own on-site responders were ill-prepared to deal with the blaze, which started just after 9 pm and burned throughout the night.  Numbers of Ministry of Defence police officers on the base at that time of day were said to be “limited” and there was only one control operator at the on-site AWE fire station, who was “overwhelmed by the demands of the incident and unable to effectively provide the information required”.
 
Significant problems were also exposed during a Ministry of Defence nuclear weapons emergency exercise which took place in East Anglia last year.  The exercise, code-named Astral Bend 2010, took place at the Defence Training Establishment at the former RAF Sculthorpe airbase in May. 
 
Emergency services and a specialist MoD nuclear team rehearsed their response to a mock crash involving a US Air Force aircraft carrying nuclear weapons which had crashed and caught fire. 
 
Had the exercise been a real emergency, civilian emergency personnel would have been placed at risk from explosions and radioactive contamination as a result of misunderstandings about key safety information because a specialist MoD nuclear emergency response team “did not emphasise the hazards adequately” and gave “insufficient priority” to liaison with emergency services, according to post-exercise evaluation reports. 
 
Firefighters, ambulance service staff, and police were placed at risk from explosions and exposure to radioactive contamination because the protective cordon set up around the crash site was too small.
 
The evaluation concluded that the response by the MoD's Nuclear Accident Response Organisation (NARO) was particularly weak. The team “struggled to manage in the exercise” and “did not have the information or knowledge to correct civilian emergency service misconceptions about the radiological hazards.”
 
Another MoD exercise has highlighted difficulties in dealing with an emergency involving a nuclear weapons convoy. 
 
Exercise Solar Victory 08, focusing on a terrorist attack on a warhead convoy in South Yorkshire, raised questions as to how emergency agencies would deal with an incident on a busy motorway away from an urban centre, with firefighters concerned about how to get water to the scene and local authority emergency planners stumped regarding how to evacuate stranded motorists from the motorway. 
 
The exercise revealed that civilian emergency planners had little knowledge of MoD guidelines on responding to an accident involving nuclear weapons, and following the exercise the Ministry of Defence Police commented that there is “a lot of work for MDP / NWIPT [Ministry of Defence Police and the MoD's Nuclear Weapons Integrated Project Team] to do in educating Home Office / Scottish Office Police forces on the task requirements and expectations during routine moves or major incidents.” 
 
Against this backdrop, standards of military safety are steadily declining. 
 
A shortage of suitably skilled and experienced personnel, cuts in spending, and the rapid rate of change in the MoD have resulted in “significant weaknesses” in military safety and a high risk that the situation will continue to deteriorate, according to the annual report of the Defence Environment and Safety Board – the MoD's senior environment and safety panel which reports to Ministers on safety matters. 
 
The report notes “increasing pressures on manpower and some equipment fragility” in keeping the Vanguard class submarines which carry the UK's Trident nuclear missiles constantly at sea on patrol, and says that nuclear safety standards have been "further aggravated by constraints on regulatory capacity". 
 
It's not just the civil nuclear industry that needs to be reviewed and tested following Fukushima.  The Ministry of Defence's nuclear weapon and submarine propulsion programme poses a greater risk to public safety in some respects, yet has so far escaped falling under the spotlight of post-Fukushima scrutiny. 
 
The risks of a military nuclear accident are just one more reason why we urgently need a world without nuclear weapons.