It’s independence or remaining the MoD’s nuclear dump

At the end of my last blog piece about attempts to get the UN to recognise Scotland as a non self-governing territory, I noted that it’s not the UN which needs to be persuaded of the case for Scottish independence, it’s the people of Scotland themselves. With that in mind let us get back to the crucial job of persuasion and offer yet more arguments about why Scotland needs independence.

Last week, the week which marked the 80th anniversary of the atomic bomb attacks on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there was an article in The Guardian newspaper which was all but ignored by a Scottish media which is desperate to avoid drawing attention to anything which puts Westminster in a bad light as it might lead people in Scotland to wonder if there might after all be something worth considering in this independence business.

A joint investigation by The Ferret and The Guardian found that water contaminated with radioactivity repeatedly leaked into Loch Long over a period of years after the Royal Navy failed to adequately maintain a network of 1500 pipes at the Coulport armaments depot on the east shore of the loch. Coulport is where the Royal Navy stores the nuclear warheads and where these warheads are loaded on to the UK’s nuclear submarine fleet to be mounted on their arsenal of ballistic missiles. These warheads are orders of magnitude more destructive than the atomic bombs which the USA dropped on Japan during WWII.

Files from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa), which the Ministry of Defence had attempted to classify as secret on the grounds of national security, show that one pipe had burst at Coulport in 2010 and a further two in 2019. One leak in August 2019 released “significant amounts of water” that flooded a nuclear weapons processing area, where it became contaminated with low levels of tritium and passed through an open drain that fed into Loch Long.

In 2009, it was reported that the two Royal Navy bases on the Clyde, Coulport and nearby Faslane, had seen a series of serious safety breaches involving repeated leaks of radioactive wast from broken pipes and waste tanks. In a confidential report released under the Freedom of Information Act that year, the MoD has admitted that safety failings at the UK’s main nuclear submarine base at Faslane, near Glasgow, are a “recurring theme” and ingrained in the base’s culture. The worst breaches include three leaks of radioactive coolant from nuclear submarines in 2004, 2007 and 2008.

The pipes continued to burst repeatedly, allowing the loch to be contaminated with radioactive waste in the form of low levels of tritium, which is used in the nuclear warheads stored at Coulport, which is one of the UK’s most secure and secretive military bases. The Royal Navy was aware of the deterioration in the pipe network and in March 2020 the Ministry of Defence promised to undertake a course of 23 specific actions necessary to remedy the situation. Despite this, the MoD failed to take action to maintain and repair the pipes with the result that there were further leaks of radioactive material into the loch in 2021 and again in 2022. The MoD accepted in 2020 that its lack of preparedness had caused “confusion”, “a breakdown in access control” and a “lack of communication of the hazards.” This however did nothing to cause the MoD to ensure that it was any more prepared in future, as the continuing leaks and burst pipes in 2021 and 2022 prove.

The Sepa files say that progress on completing the 23 remedial actions “had been slow and delayed in many cases,” and added “The events have highlighted shortcomings in asset management across the naval base.”

David Cullen, a nuclear weapons expert with the defence thinktank Basic in London, told The Guardian that the repeated pollution incidents were shocking and the attempts to keep them secret were “outrageous”.

He added: “The MoD is almost 10 years into a nearly £2bn infrastructure programme at Faslane and Coulport, and yet they apparently didn’t have a proper asset management system as recently as 2022. This negligent approach is far too common in the nuclear weapons programme, and is a direct consequence of a lack of oversight.”

As a military base, Coulport enjoys Crown Immunity from environmental and pollution controls. The MoD has a long history of using Scotland as a dumping ground for unwanted military waste and taking a cavalier attitude to the pollution it creates. There was the dumping of vast quantities of unwanted munitions, including chemical weapons, in Beaufort Dyke in the North Channel between Scotland and Ireland after WWI and WWII, the radioactive contamination of beaches in Fife from dumped military aircraft parts which the MoD spent decades denying responsibility for and refusing to clean up.

In 2020, the MoD applied to overhaul waste disposal from the Faslane and Coulport nuclear bases near Helensburgh leading to fears that radioactive discharges could rise sharply. Liquid waste from the reactors that power the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarines and from the processing of Trident nuclear warheads would be discharged from Faslane into the Gareloch nearby via a proposed new pipeline.

It’s not just repeated discharges by the MoD of contaminated waste water into the nearby loch which is cause for concern. According to recent figures from Sepa, emissions of the radioactive gas, tritium, from the Royal Naval Armaments Depot on Loch Long, have risen steadily between 2018 and 2023 from 1.7 billion to 4.2 billion units of radioactivity. The MoD refuses to say what is the cause behind this almost 250% increase in emissions of a radioactive gas associated with an increase risk of cancer when breathed in in significant quantities. Sepa says that the levels of the gas in the local area are well within safe limits. Tritium gas is known to leak from ageing nuclear reactors such as those which power the Royal Navy’s nuclear submarine fleet.

These recent reports would be concerning enough if they were isolated incidents, but they are part of a decades long series of leaks an pollution which the MoD itself admitted in 2009 to be a “recurring theme” and ingrained in the culture of the bases. That’s a polite way of saying that the MoD doesn’t care about the environmental damage it causes in nuclear bases which are only a short distance from the largest city in Scotland.

As long as Scotland continues to remain a part of this dysfunctional so-called United Kingdom, the MoD will continue its culture of secrecy, denial and cover up as it uses Scotland as a dumping ground for dangerous and hazardous waste which could damage the health and well being of the Scottish environment and the people who live near to the sites of the MoD’s waste dumping.

Given that culture of secrecy and denial, these are only the instances of hazardous waste which we know about. We can only guess what else the MoD and the British state have successfully kept the public from knowing about. If Scotland wants a clean envirornment, free from the radioactive pollution of the UK’s weapons of mass destruction, and free from the moral stain of being host to these horrifying weapons, we can only achieve it with independence.

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