Safety breaches leaked at UK nuclear plant

By Antony Barnett

LONDON: A little blue pamphlet is regularly delivered to homes surrounding Britain's secret atomic warhead factory at Aldermaston (AWE) in Berkshire, west of London. Running to 11 pages, it lists the measures people living near by should take in the event of a nuclear accident, telling them to stay in doors and listen to the radio.

Not that the locals have any real reason to fear: it reassures them that there will be no "immediate danger" to anyone. In any case, those running the bomb factory continually tell the public, the chance of an accident is so remote it is not worth worrying about.

On Sunday, The Observer newspaper in London provided proof that this confidence was indeed misplaced and all is not well inside Aldermaston.

The newspaper revealed an appalling catalog of over 100 errors and safety breaches in the past 12 months, as well as details of an incident in 1993 which might have killed thousands of people.

The blue pamphlet would have been of little use to anyone living within miles of Aldermaston if luck -- and nothing else -- had not prevented a nuclear disaster that could have wiped out large parts of the nearby large town of Reading.

In September 1993, top nuclear scientists at Aldermaston were facing a crisis. Shavings of highly enriched uranium -- one of the most dangerous substances known to mankind -- had been discovered in an oil tank placed beneath a lathe.

The machinery had been used to cut the uranium into the correct shape so that it could fit in the core of a nuclear warhead. To their horror, the scientists quickly realized that one false move could trigger an atomic fission explosion leading to nuclear catastrophe.

It only takes a few hundredths of a gram of highly enriched uranium in a water-based oil for "criticality" to be breached. Criticality occurs when too much fissile material collects together and triggers a nuclear explosion.

This is exactly what happened at Japan's Tokaimura plant last month and such an event at Aldermaston would lead to a massive release of radioactive material over Reading, with devastating consequences for the town's population of 250,000.

Making the situation safe at Aldermaston was highly nerve- racking. A team of highly specialized nuclear engineers had to inject the oil tank with boron gas which stabilizes the uranium. The contents of the tank then had to be drained off drip by drip.

According to a letter passed to The Observer from a senior source working at Aldermaston, it was only by pure chance that the uranium was discovered after a small oil leak under the lathe was checked.

The letter says: "Nobody had a clue what the criticality safety limit was, how much highly enriched uranium there was or how long it had been there. It is not a containment building: it is a 1950s industrial shed with breeze-block walls and an asbestos roof, i.e. even flimsier than the one at Tokaimura ... More employees and public would have been exposed in Japan. We were only saved by pure luck."

Despite the seriousness of the 1993 episode -- which has been officially confirmed by a senior director at Aldermaston -- only sketchy details were ever made public. This is the first time the citizens who live in Reading will have learnt of how close they came to a nuclear disaster.

Many will not be surprised. The Atomic Weapons Establishment which runs Aldermaston and the nearby site at Burghfield -- where nuclear components and high explosives are assembled in the warheads in underground bunkers -- has a long history of secrecy.

Ever since the first building was completed on the 880-acre former wartime airfield in 1951, Aldermaston has been viewed with suspicion by peace and environmental campaigners.

In 1978 high doses of plutonium were found in the lungs of 12 workers at Aldermaston. The then Labor Government sent Sir Edward Pochin, an eminent radiologist, to the site in 1978 to conduct an inquiry into the safety of the site.

Pochin's report was scathing and detailed 73 recommendations for changes. The full report has never been publicly released but criticisms included that buildings had ventilation systems that blew radioactive contaminants into workers' faces.

Vera Allum, who died in 1991 after contracting breast and lymph cancers, worked in Aldermaston's laundry from 1965 to 1978. Although plutonium was initially found in her lungs, the Atomic Weapons Establishment has always refused to admit responsibility. Her niece Liz who lives in Reading is still fighting for compensation and campaigning for greater openness.

She said: "After all this time there are still so many unanswered questions. Nobody seems to tell you the truth and the company belittles anybody that asks awkward questions."

The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) 's report into Aldermaston published earlier this month found that the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) was still guilty of concealing vital information about dangerous accidents and pollution from regulators and the public.

It listed several serious incidents at Aldermaston between 1993 and 1998 where the public had never been officially notified.

For instance, it was only in August this year that the AWE admitted that in 1993 there had been a significant and "unplanned" discharge of tritrium -- a radioactive isotope of hydrogen and a key ingredient of all modern day thermonuclear warheads.

While scientists disagree on the dangers of tritium some studies have linked high tritium discharges to cancers and birth deformities like Down's syndrome. Still, according to CND, the discharge was kept secret for so long on the grounds of "national security".

Many of 100 safety breaches disclosed in today's Observer would never have been made public.

On 29 March this year, for example, abnormal plutonium readings were found offsite, but the management decided that this was not "reportable".

According to independent nuclear expert John Large, "there must have been risk of plutonium exposure to members of the public, but this is not considered to be a reportable incident".

Large says many of the safety breaches simply "beggar belief". On the 16 April "high explosives were found in a container which was marked as empty". On the 14 May, two staff members were found locked into a "void" adjacent to where a laser -- used to simulate the temperature of the sun for purposes of nuclear research -- was about to be fired.

Last month alone a can "containing plutonium was wrongly identified", "criticality rules for a number of safes and work station breached" and a photographer nearly set off a large explosion at Burghfield by bringing in a metal tripod to a high explosives area.

Metal materials are not allowed near explosive because they could cause a spark which might trigger an explosion. Most worrying about this incident was, in AWE's own words, a "trail of powder led to a hopper containing a large amount of additional explosive which no one present knew about".

Six years after one of the most damning reports on the operations at Aldermaston was published by Greenpeace little has really changed. Entitled Inside the Citadel, after the site's top-security inner sanctum where plutonium is handled, the pamphlet revealed that almost 100 workers had been contaminated, injured or killed at Aldermaston since 1951.

Greenpeace documented fires plus explosions and radioactive leaks and the report concluded that many of Pochin's recommendations had not been fully implemented.

Labour's then defense spokesman, David Clark, called for a public inquiry, but the Conservative Government refused. Frustrated by the political cul-de-sac in 1994, Reading Borough Council decided to set up its own "community" inquiry chaired by leading lawyer Helena Kennedy.

She heard 12 hours of evidence over two days from 45 witnesses, including representatives of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, as well as Carol Barton, hematologist at Reading's Royal Berkshire Hospital, who revealed that children living in the Aldermaston and Burghfield areas showed more than twice the average level of leukemia.

Kennedy concluded: "It is my opinion that full public inquiry into the health, environmental and safety aspects of AWE Aldermaston and Burghfield is long overdue."

But the Conservative Government still refused to launch an inquiry.

Instead it pushed ahead with the privatization of AWE, putting the management of the Aldermaston and Burghfield sites under private contractor Hunting Brae, which is 31 percent owned by the controversial U.S. firm Brown & Root.

In 1997, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) launched its first prosecution against AWE when two workers were contaminated with uranium.The prosecutor for the HSE concluded that there were "widespread deficiencies in management, supervision and safety culture at the Establishment".

With Sunday's revelations in The Observer, it is hard to escape the conclusion that what was true in 1997 is still true today.

-- Observer News Service