Official documents show that radioactive water from a base storing Britain's nuclear bombs entered the sea after old pipes repeatedly burst. The regulator found that radioactive material entered Loch Long, a sea loch near Glasgow in western Scotland, because the Royal Navy failed to properly maintain a network of 1,500 water pipes at the base, UNN writes with reference to The Guardian.
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The Coulport armaments depot on Loch Long is one of the most secure and secret military facilities in the UK. It holds the Royal Navy's stock of nuclear warheads for the four Trident submarines based nearby.
Files compiled by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa), the government's pollution watchdog, show that up to half of the components at the base had exceeded their design life when the leaks occurred.
SEPA stated that the flooding at Coulport was caused by "maintenance deficiencies," leading to the release of "unnecessary radioactive waste" in the form of low-level tritium, which is used in nuclear warheads.
In one 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 old pipes at risk of bursting were "suboptimal."
The leaks were revealed in a series of confidential inspection reports and emails provided to the investigative website Ferret and shared with The Guardian, which Sepa and the Ministry of Defence had tried to keep secret.
They were released by order of David Hamilton, the Scottish Information Commissioner, who oversees compliance with Scotland's freedom of information laws, after a six-year struggle by journalists to access the files.
The UK government insisted that the files should remain secret for national security reasons, but in June, Hamilton ruled that most of them should be released. He said their disclosure threatened "reputation" rather than national security.
They were released in August after another delay, after the Ministry of Defence requested more time to review them, citing "additional national security considerations."
British nuclear fleet
Nuclear warheads are fitted to British Trident missiles at Coulport, where the missiles are loaded onto Vanguard-class submarines before heading to sea for secret patrols as part of the UK's nuclear deterrent.
The British nuclear weapons fleet has been based at Faslane on the nearby Gare Loch since the early 1960s. Trident is regularly replenished with warheads to maintain the weapon's operability.
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Thousands of people in Hiroshima commemorated the victims of the 1945 atomic bombing. The city's mayor called on world leaders to visit Hiroshima and consider the lessons of the tragedy, warning of the consequences of military buildup.