A base let irradiated water flow into a Scottish loch several times due to poor upkeep, a watchdog has revealed

Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Prince of Wales arriving at Glenmallen on Loch Long on November 22, 2024. © Getty Images / Andrew Milligan/PA Images

Radioactive water from the UK’s Coulport weapons depot leaked into Loch Long in western Scotland on several occasions after aging pipes burst, according to files from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) published by The Ferret, an investigative journalism platform.

The Royal Naval Armaments Depot stores the nuclear warheads for the British Royal Navy’s Trident-class submarines. SEPA said up to half of its 1,500 water pipes were past their design life when the leaks happened. It blamed “shortfalls in maintenance” for flooding that released low levels of tritium, a radioactive substance used in warheads, into the loch, which is popular with swimmers, divers, kayakers and fishers. Small amounts of tritium are generally harmless, but high or prolonged exposure can raise cancer risks.

The files reveal that pipes burst in 2010 and twice in 2019. In August 2019, a warhead processing area was flooded; contaminated water then flowed through an open drain into the loch. SEPA said the tritium levels were very low and posed no threat to public health.

 

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The UK Ministry of Defense agreed in 2020 to take steps to prevent more bursts. But SEPA later found that progress on these measures was slow and problems with asset management persisted. There were two further pipe bursts in 2021, including one in another area that also held radioactive substances, prompting another SEPA inspection in 2022.

The documents were released after a six-year fight under Scotland’s freedom of information laws, the newspaper wrote. Scottish Information Commissioner David Hamilton ruled in June that most files must be made public, rejecting the military’s claims that secrecy was needed to ensure national security. He said the main risk was to “reputations,” not safety. While SEPA said radioactivity levels in these incidents were very low and did not endanger human health, it found there were “shortfalls in maintenance and asset management that led to the failure of the coupling that indirectly led to the production of unnecessary radioactive waste.”

In May, The Ferret reported that there had been 12 nuclear incidents at Faslane Royal Navy submarine base since 2023 that could have released radioactive substances.