Radioactive water leaked into the sea after old pipes burst at a base housing the UK’s nuclear bomb, official files shared with the Guardian revealed.
The radioactive material was leached into Loch Long, in western Scotland, after the Royal Navy failed to properly maintain some of the 1,500 water pipes on base, according to the findings of a regulator.
The Scottish Environment Protection Agency warned that up to half of the components at the base were beyond their design life when the leaks began.
Leaking radioactive water
An earlier report by the agency from 2022 said that plans to replace the vast network of pipes were inadequate and accused the navy of failing to properly store equipment.
The investigation found there was a leak at the Coulport depot in 2010 and a further two in 2019, and two in 2021, with an incident in August 2019 causing “significant amounts of water” to flood a nuclear weapons processing area. The water was contaminated with low levels of tritium and fed back to Loch Long.
The Loch Long armament base, one of the UK’s most secure and secretive military sites, holds the Royal Navy’s nuclear warheads for its Trident submarines.
The agency reported that flooding at the depot was caused by “shortfalls in maintenance,” which resulted in the release of “unnecessary radioactive waste.”
Both the British Defense Ministry and the agency fought to keep reports on the base secret, citing threats to national security, according to the Guardian. The documents were released by order of David Hamilton, the Scottish information commissioner, after a six-year-long battle by the media for access to the reports.
A Defense Ministry spokesperson told the Guardian it placed “the utmost importance on our responsibilities for handling radioactive substances safely and securely. There have been no unsafe releases of radioactive material into the environment at any stage.”