(UK) Ministry of Defence admits to further radioactive leaks from submarines

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/18/mod-nuclear-waste-submarines

Ministry of Defence admits to further radioactive leaks from submarines

Critics round on ministry's 'scandalous' safety record after admission to nine nuclear submarine leaks in past 12 years

Rob Edwards
guardian.co.uk, Monday 18 May 2009 17.14 BST

Radioactive waste has leaked from Britain's nuclear submarines nine times in the past 12 years, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has admitted. Two of the leaks – including one at Devonport near Plymouth two months ago – had not been revealed until today.

Confirmation of the leaks raises new questions about the MoD's safety record, which has been coming under increasing scrutiny since HMS Vanguard, a British submarine armed with Trident nuclear missiles, collided with a nuclear-armed French submarine, Le Triomphant, under the Atlantic in February.

Last month, the Guardian reported a series of http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/apr/27/nuclear-mod-clyde-saftey-breaches">safety breaches at the Royal Navy's nuclear submarine base at Faslane near Glasgow. Documents released to Channel Four News under freedom of information legislation disclosed three leaks of radioactivity from nuclear submarines into the Firth of Clyde in 2004, 2007 and 2008.

A further four leaks have been previously reported: two at Devonport in 2005 and 2008 and two at sea in 1997 and 2000. Now the MoD has told the Guardian about another two inadvertent releases of radioactivity, both of which were hitherto unknown.

…

[NNadir]

1. Any word on the leaking of dangerous fossil fuel waste from Royal Navy aircraft?

None.

How about the leaking of dangerous fossil fuel waste from Royal Airforce jet aircraft?

None?

Why is that do ya think?

My guess is selective attention, which is amazing, because military and civilian dangerous fossil fuel waste routinely kill millions of people each year.

Actually radioactivity is the easiest thing in the world to detect. Since this is the case, it is easy to quantitate the scale of this "leak."

I will bet money that the deal is just like the hysteria involved with the scary "nuclear earthquake" in Japan that anti-nukes were hyping for so long.

All of the people in that event were killed by non-radioactive falling buildings and by the dangerous fossil fuel released while the reactors were shut. No one died from the "radioactive leak" hyped by anti-nukes.

The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa reactor, reported by the anti-nukes in "situation dire" nonsense at the time restarted last week, and will now save Japanese and foreign human lives by preventing the unrestricted leaking of dangerous fossil fuel waste.

I very much doubt that anyone is coming here to report an injury or death involved with this "radioactive" leak.

[Dead_Parrot]

2. I wonder if these also equate to 2% of a luminous watch?

Homer Simpson 'nuclear waste spill' panic at nuke sub base!

So to sum up. These "liquid radioactive waste leaks" were utterly, mindbogglingly unimportant. You could go out and buy a cheap, fully legal luminous watch, throw it into the Gareloch, and you would have released many, many times more radioactive contaminants than the Navy did here. You can wear that watch, and if it's a cheaply-made one (eg an older Swatch) the tritium will leak out as though you had a small submarine base, operating just one or two subs, strapped to your wrist. Tritium will (aaiee!) get absorbed into your body, emerging in due course at detectable levels in your urine. But you'll be fine.
...
Full disclosure: Lewis Page is a former navy diver who served several years at Faslane. On one occasion he did lose a tritium-dial service watch while diving in the Gareloch: he is thus personally responsible for more radioactive contamination in the loch than several entire submarine crews.

Hey ho. Anyone wanting to check how much radioactivity was involved can check out the reports themselves, since they're not quite as confidential as Rob Edwards makes out. They're here.

Conversion to bear in mind: 24MBq = 4 acres of carrots. Fear them!

[Nihil]

5. Enlightening article that one ...

> It's certainly no surprise to find that this "story" has the fingerprints
> of Rob Edwards all over it. (He is named in the "secret" emails released
> by SEPA.) As well as having worked for the Guardian, Channel 4,#
> New Scientist and various Scottish media, Edwards is a former leading
> light of the CND and the Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace.

> At least once every year, as he has done here, Edwards goes out and gets
> hold of some astonishingly boring, hundreds of pages long, publicly-
> available documents to do with nuclear safety. Then he trawls through them
> until he has found something on which to hang a scaremongering headline -
> safe in the knowledge that very few other journos will bother to check
> what he says. The Edwards nuke-fear sausage machine is remorseless.

Gosh. I wonder who this reminds us of?
:evilgrin:

[bananas]

6. The Register has really gone down hill

The Register article is dated April 28 and is written in response to the Guardian articled dated April 27. The Guardian article dated April 27 clearly says that although the leaks were small, they should not have happened at all if proper safety procedures were being followed. So the Register explains that the leaks were small, completely ignoring the point of the article.

[Nihil]

7. Only if reality is "down hill" from panic-mongering

> The Guardian article dated April 27 clearly says that although the leaks
> were small, they should not have happened at all if proper safety procedures
> were being followed. So the Register explains that the leaks were small,
> completely ignoring the point of the article.

Nope. The Register explains that the panic-mongering author of the Guardian
article was deliberately distorting the situation and playing on the usual
ignorance of the general public to let him get away with it - i.e., the jerk
was caught out whilst spreading bullshit (again).

Alternatively, maybe the Register was simply pointing out that the
"arrgh! nuclear! panic! meltdown!" contingent have no sense of scale or proportionality.

Both views are true enough.
:shrug:

[bananas]

8. What "panic-mongering"?

There wasn't any "panic-mongering" in either of the Guardian articles.
Did you listen to the audio with the April article?
There's no panic, and he clearly says the amount of radiation leaked was minor.

It's similar to the Minot incident, when a USAF pilot flew a plane with a nuclear cruise missile attached. It was a serious breach of safety protocols, even though no radiation was released and nobody was hurt. It indicated that there was a serious problem which needed to be corrected.

Here's something written in February on the Professional Reactor Operator website after a couple of nuclear subs collided, are they panic-mongering? No, of course not, but they are saying there are serious problems which need to be corrected:

How do we end our nuclear nightmares? Are these Sailors Trained to Rickover Standards?

The answer is NO. The quality of the nuclear submariner has declined over the past decade as the Nuclear Navy relaxes standards.

Without the proper training, mistakes are more likely, events are more likely. There are many executives in the nuclear industry that believe training is a waste of time and money. The training budgets are cut to bare bones. Many have trouble even being supplied pens and pencils. If you think this is a joke, I am serious. One simulator is using electronic I/O boards from the old Zion simulator. When the budget went to the CNO for replacement - it's too much money, send it back for bids. We had one of our instructors benchmark a flight simulation center. They replace their simulators every eight years.

INPO is doing the utilities a disservice when they handout INPO #1 Status to plants that do not even come close to hitting the mark. Davis Besse was INPO #1 prior to the reactor head event.

Here is the public reaction to when things go bad. One accident now could derail our counties energy security.

Leicester CND was very shocked that two nuclear-powered, nuclear-armed submarines had collided under the Atlantic Ocean.

HMS Vanguard, carrying Britain's Trident "deterrent" and the French submarine Le Triomphant had a total of 96 nuclear warheads "bumping" into each other.

In the case of "our" Vanguard, each of its 16 missiles contains 70 tonnes of high explosive before you get to the 48 nuclear warheads – and those are each eight times the size of the atom bomb which destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.

Each submarine is powered by a nuclear reactor. This was a potential nuclear nightmare.

<snip>

Submitted by NUCBIZ on February 23, 2009

[Dead_Parrot]

9. Wait, what?

The Register article is dated April 28 and is written in response to the Guardian articled dated April 27.

Welcome to the 20th century. Newspapers generally don't have to wait for the packet steamer anymore, especially online ones. Wait till you get to the 21st and stuff happens in a matter of minutes. Scary.

The Guardian article dated April 27 clearly says that although the leaks were small...

It's wrapped up in some very weaselly wording: "The MoD insists that..." "risks appear slight...". Rather flourid language compared to "Barely distinguishable for the Cobalt⁶⁰ limits of detection" and "less than 0.0001% of annual tritium discharge levels" that we find in the serpa reports.

...they should not have happened at all if proper safety procedures were being followed.

Actually, if you bother to read the serpa documents, you'll find that the proceedures were inadequate and have been changed, which is why serpa's findings include: "This proceedure... has been revised to ensure the discharge valve ((D43) on the active waste tank is closed for the duration of pressure testing and discharge activities" and "Ensure that all tank levels are known prior to the issue of the PEB and that they continue to be monitored at all stages of the tank fill - COMPLETE". Which is why the MoD invited serpa to review the proceedures. However, that would require you to read the actual source documents rather than being told what to think in a 4 minute mp3.

"The most damaging revelation is that there is a culture of rule breaking" is a wholesale fabrication made up by Edwards, as is evident to anyone who actually reads the serpa documents. Presumably this is why he doesn't link to them in his article.

So the Register explains that the leaks were small...

More to the point, they actually put some figures to them. Math is hard, isn't it?

...completely ignoring the point of the article.

When the point of the article is scaremongering, it deserves to be ignored. I've always been fond of objectivity, which is something Edwards clearly thinks is an optional extra when it comes to reporting.

[bananas]

3. "The most damaging revelation is that there is a culture of rule breaking"

In the audio report with last month's article:
"The most damaging revelation is that there is a culture of rule breaking"

Since then, more leaks have been revealed. There are probably other incidents yet to be revealed, perhaps some much more serious.

A culture of rule breaking can be very difficult to change,
as we have seen here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x887597

[madokie]

4. If we have learned one thing about the nuclear power industry over the years

that would be they do not tell us any more than they want us to know. Hardly honest.

Interesting the link to the culture of rule breaking, I hadn't read that one before.