MoD has a long history of disregard for Scotland's environment
The leaks have been occurring over a period of at least 20 years but the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has attempted to cover up its negligence by claiming it's a matter of national security.
The information was only finally revealed earlier this month following a six year long battle involving Scotland's information commissioner David Hamilton who finally ruled that the relevant documents should be released after finding that notwithstanding the claims of the MoD, their disclosure only threatened "reputations", not national security.
The Scottish Greens have said the repeated leaks are a 'stark failure on the part of the UK Government', adding that it could have 'serious consequences'.
The release of the documents highlights the repeated cover ups by the MoD as it attempted to avoid public awareness of its reckless negligence.
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 waste 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 included three leaks of radioactive coolant from nuclear submarines in 2004, 2007 and again in 2008.
However, due to a lack of proper maintenance, and the ongoing culture of an acceptance of safety failures at the facility, 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, one of the UK's most secure and secretive military bases.
The MoD has no excuses here. The Royal Navy had been aware of the deterioration in the pipe network since at least 2009, but it was only in March 2020 that the MoD promised to undertake a course of 23 specific actions necessary to remedy a situation which had been causing the leakage of radioactive waste for well over a decade.
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 Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) insisted that its assessments found the risk to the environment from the effluent discharges was "of no regulatory concern," while the MoD said there had been "no unsafe releases of radioactive material" into the environment.
Reacting to the latest disclosures, Scottish Greens West Scotland MSP Ross Greer said: "It is scandalous, but given the long list of previous incidents at Faslane and Coulport, its sadly no surprise.
"The Ministry of Defence has long played fast and loose with these weapons of mass slaughter, throwing billions at private contractors whilst failing to even maintain its own facilities.
He added: "These revelations will have been particularly chilling for my constituents who live near the site. To reassure them, UK Ministers must now investigate and explain why it happened and the steps they are taking to ensure it never does again. We need full transparency and accountability, not more secrecy.
'Nuclear weapons are a moral obscenity. They have no place in Scotland. These incidents underline the direct risk to the local communities who host them.
"It's time to disarm our waters and get these dangerous weapons of mass slaughter out of Scotland."
Alba depute leader Neale Hanvey added: 'This is a disgraceful cover-up by the UK Government. Radioactive leaks into Scottish waters were kept secret to protect Westminster's nuclear obsession – not our communities.
'The UK Government and MoD have form when it come to this. When I challenged them on radiation leaks in 2023 their response raised more questions than it answered.
'Scotland is treated as a dumping ground for weapons we don't want and dangers we didn't vote for. Independence is the only way we rid ourselves of nuclear weapons and end this toxic disregard for our nation's safety.'
The MoD has a long history of disregard for the Scottish environment and a culture of denial and cover up in which it is enabled by the Crown Immunity which it and its facilities enjoy. When you are literally above the law there is no incentive for the MoD to take environmental and public safety issues seriously, no matter what reassuring words a MoD spokesperson puts out in a press release when the MoD has been unable to maintain secrecy about its negligence and carelessness.
Refusing to accept nuclear waste is for woke snowflakes …
Also on an unwanted nuclear theme, concerns have been raised by the UK Government's 'utterly reckless' approach to nuclear energy – as a new report recommends ministers tear up 'needless' regulations in order to speed up the development of new civilian nuclear power projects.
A taskforce commissioned by the UK Government to look into nuclear regulations has recommended a 'radical reset' to speed up projects. Its final report is expected to focus on tackling what the UK Government described as a 'culture of risk aversion' in nuclear energy regulation, because apparently avoiding risk is a bad thing now.
Presumably we need to throw caution to the wind and start making our tea with the Royal Navy's waste water contaminated by Tritium, after all it's only being "risk averse" that stops us doing so. Refusing to accept radioactive waste is for woke snowflakes. Everyone knows that radioactive snowflakes are much prettier as they glow in the dark.
Scottish Greens co-leader Lorna Slater said: 'This seems utterly reckless. Nuclear energy is extremely costly and insecure, and it leaves a long and toxic legacy for future generations.
'The last thing we should be doing is cutting corners, especially when it comes to something so dangerous.'
She added that nuclear energy was 'totally unnecessary when it comes to our environmental objectives'.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Spectator
17 hours ago
- Spectator
Trump's Alaska meeting is a gift for Putin
From the Kremlin's point of view, holding a US-Russia summit in Anchorage, Alaska is an idea of fiendish brilliance. The venue itself determines the agenda. Literally half a world away from the petty concerns of the European continent, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin can flex the vastness of their respective countries. Anchorage is an eight-hour flight from Washington D.C. and roughly the same distance from Moscow, flying over no other country but Russia for most of the way. By travelling to the point where their countries almost touch in the North Pacific, both leaders can feel justified in prioritising issues that concern just the two of them, from arms control treaties to space cooperation to Arctic mineral rights. Seen from Anchorage, Ukraine seems a very distant and very local problem. The summit is the brainchild of Yuri Ushakov, a veteran diplomat who joined the USSR's foreign ministry in 1970. Ushakov is a wily old attack dog who learned the ways of Washington during a decade-long stint as Russian ambassador from 1998 to 2008. And in suggesting Alaska as a meeting point, Ushakov clearly knows how to flatter not only Trump's ego but also his own President's obsession with history. For Putin, Russia's conquest of north-east Asia and much of the coast of America's Pacific north-west is the founding myth of his country's modern greatness. In the 16th century Muscovy and Spain had both defeated Muslim occupiers and began expanding into rich new worlds east and west – in Spain's case, gold-rich America; in Muscovy's, fur-rich Siberia. Spanish conquistadors and Russian Cossacks reached the Pacific from different sides and started settling colonies along the coasts. In 1776, the Spanish Crown ordered the foundation of San Francisco – in the form of a Franciscan Mission and garrisoned Presidio – in direct response to news that Catherine the Great had started assembling a major Russian fleet to grab the unclaimed territory of northern California. In the event, Catherine's fleet was redeployed to fight a war with the Swedes, leaving most of California to the Spanish. Who was to say who was the more logical ruler of America's north-west coast, distant Madrid or distant St Petersburg? From 1816 until 1842 the southernmost frontier of the Russian empire was 70 miles north of San Francisco at Fort Ross on the Russian River (hence the name). For a brief period in the early 19th century Russia had a colony on Kaua'i island in Hawaii. And until 1867 the modern state of Alaska with its 6,500-mile coastline was known as Russian America and was a possession of the Tsar's. In the wake of the Crimean War, during which a Royal Navy force bombarded and briefly occupied the port of Petropavlovsk on Kamchatka, Tsar Alexander II realised he lacked the naval power to maintain control of his American colonies. He first offered Russian America to the British prime minister Lord Palmerston for the eminently logical reason that the territory was contiguous with British Columbia. Palmerston, however, was uninterested in acquiring half a million square miles of mostly unexplored North American wilderness. The only other plausible buyer was the US. But it took two years, and the distribution of tens of thousands of dollars in bribes to congressmen, for the Russians to persuade a reluctant secretary of state, William Seward, to write a cheque for $7.2 million for the Alaska Purchase – mocked at the time as 'Seward's Folly'. Even today, Alaska still bears the stamp of its century and a half as part of the Russian empire. A third of Alaska's population is Native American (by far the largest proportion of any US state) and most of the Aleut and Tlingit peoples still adhere to the Russian Orthodox faith. The major feature of every coastal town from Sitka to Kodiak is a distinctively Russian church, and there are communities of black-robed monks on out-lying islands – though most are Americans and their services are in English. Colonial echoes of Britain, France and Spain are commonplace in other countries, whether Anglican worshippers in Simla, French baguettes in Saigon or Spanish missions in California. Living echoes of a vanished Russian empire are much rarer and exist mostly in Alaska. It is clearly flattering and heartwarming for Putin to meet his American counterpart on what was once Russian territory. Some more excitable western commentators have claimed that hosting a summit in Anchorage encourages Putin's neo-imperial ambitions – including, supposedly, reclaiming the American lands sold by Alexander II. But the idea that 'Alaska Nash' (Alaska is Ours) is anything other than a Russian pub joke is absurd. A roadside billboard bearing that slogan and featuring a map of Russia including all of Alaska has been doing the rounds of Twitter as supposed evidence of Putin's revanchism. In fact it's just a jokey advertisement for a real estate company called Alaska. Rather than dog-whistling Russian imperialism, the location allows Putin to appeal to a bygone age of Russian-American cooperation where the two nations divided up large swaths of the world. The most recent example is, to Putin's mind, the Yalta conference of February 1945 where Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill pored over maps and divided spheres of influence in the crumbling Nazi empire. A similar carve-up of Ukrainian territory is exactly what Volodymyr Zelensky fears and he has spent the week since the summit was announced gathering European support to insist that no deal can be done over the heads of the Ukrainians. Unfortunately for Kyiv, and for the Europeans, they're not invited. It's also highly likely that even if Putin and Trump reach some kind of a deal on a ceasefire, it will be largely on Russia's terms. But it's also possible that Moscow and Washington could agree on other, non-Ukraine related issues, such as getting Putin back on board with the New START treaty limiting the number of deployed nuclear weapons – the kind of deal that nuclear superpowers make between each other. And there is nothing that both Putin and Trump enjoy more than playing the role of imperial presidents.
The Guardian
19 hours ago
- The Guardian
Scottish Greens must broaden appeal beyond middle-class urbanites, says leadership candidate
The Scottish Greens have to broaden their appeal beyond middle-class urbanites by talking to voters in industrial towns facing wholesale job losses, a Green leadership candidate has said. Gillian Mackay is one of four Scottish Greens bidding to win two co-leader posts after Patrick Harvie, the UK's longest-serving party leader, quit as co-convener earlier this year. The pro-independence Scottish Greens are currently Holyrood's fourth largest party, with seven MSPs, and could play a key role in the devolved parliament after next year's elections. The Greens prop up the Scottish National party government in Edinburgh, which does not have a majority at Holyrood and is expected to form a minority administration again next year. Recent polls place the Greens as high as 15%, suggesting they could win several more seats. Mackay said her area around Falkirk had been devastated by industrial decline, including the closure of Grangemouth oil refinery earlier this year, yet the Scottish Greens historically had failed to connect with local voters. The Scottish and UK governments knew Grangemouth would close, affecting several thousand jobs in the region, but had failed to put in place an industrial strategy to guarantee green jobs, she said. Two factories owned by Alexander Dennis making electric buses were also expected to close within weeks and their jobs to shift to Nottinghamshire. Farmers and workers dependent on the oil industry around Aberdeen also felt excluded. That meant the just transition from fossil fuel industries to sustainable jobs had failed, Mackay said. 'The Green narrative of green jobs and green industry actually needs to have teeth,' she said. The party was very good at the 'high-level' policy but poor at making it meaningful to people directly affected. 'What matters to our voters is what they see, feel and hear in their communities and I don't think we're quite cutting through at that level.' Voting for the two co-convener posts opened on Wednesday, with about 7,500 party members eligible to vote before a result is declared on Friday 29 August. Alongside Mackay, the candidates are Lorna Slater, Harvie's current co-convener, who had a torrid time as a Scottish government minister in the Greens' power-sharing deal with the SNP, Ross Greer, a backbencher, and Dominic Ashmole, a party activist in the Scottish Borders who is vying to become a councillor for the first time. Unlike Green party elections in England and Wales, Scottish rules make it harder for two candidates to run on joint tickets, because their names cannot appear on the ballot paper as joint candidates. Sign up to First Edition Our morning email breaks down the key stories of the day, telling you what's happening and why it matters after newsletter promotion And for the first time, the Scottish Greens have also dropped a rule that requires the party to elect at least one woman as co-leader, after legal advice partly influenced by the UK supreme court ruling on the Equality Act's definition of a woman. Greer, who has called for free travel on all of Scotland's buses, is widely seen as a favourite to win one of the two posts. With Ashmole considered a rank outsider, the contest for the second post is between Slater and Mackay. Given her almost three years as a junior minister, Slater is presenting herself as the most experienced continuity candidate, who has told party members she believes co-conveners are their delegates and are not in overall control. Her critics point to the intense controversy surrounding her failed bid to introduce a wide-ranging deposit return scheme for drinks containers in Scotland before the rest of the UK. Greer, an architect of the Bute House power-sharing agreement with the SNP, believes the party needs stronger political leadership and has to be much clearer on its core policies, on poverty, climate and nature. 'We need to nail down which voters we're trying to speak to and what we're trying to achieve,' he said.
The National
21 hours ago
- The National
White House 'should pay policing bill for JD Vance's Scotland holiday'
The party has called for any policing bill during the US vice president's visit to be sent to the White House instead. The calls come after Police Scotland confirmed that the force was preparing for a 'significant policing operation' for Vance's stay at a resort in Ayrshire. Some reports have suggested that as many as 1000 officers could be drafted in to help with the policing operation. READ MORE: David Lammy broke law while fishing with JD Vance Scottish Greens MSP Maggie Chapman has urged Police Scotland and the Scottish Government to ensure that no public money is spent on Vance's holiday. She said: 'Neither Vance nor his politics are welcome in Scotland. We certainly should not be spending taxpayers' money to host him when he is doing so much damage. 'I urge Police Scotland and the Scottish Government to ensure that no public money is being spent on this holiday, and that any bill is sent directly to the White House.' Vance has already been condemned by the party for his 'lies about Scotland' as he previously claimed earlier this year that Scots who pray in their homes could be prosecuted after the recent introduction of buffer zones around Scottish abortion clinics. The US vice president used a speech in Munich to argue Europe was seeing a shift away from democratic values and claimed the 'basic liberties of religious Britons, in particular' are under threat, citing the Scottish Government law as an example. Chapman argued that Vance's controversial views have no place in Scotland. 'JD Vance is a far right extremist who has peddled misinformation and lies,' she said. 'He has played a central role in the racist Trump government that has torn apart families and communities, attacked women's rights, and armed the genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.' She added: 'After all of the shameful fawning over the recent Trump visit, it is crucial that our government stands up for human rights and makes clear that the values that Vance represents have no place here.' (Image: Phil Noble/Reuters) Last month Police Scotland said policing across the country would be 'seriously affected' ahead of the US president Donald Trump's visit. In July, officers from Northern Ireland and England were drafted in to help police Trump's four-day stay at his golf clubs in South Ayrshire and Aberdeenshire, which Police Scotland had to fit the bill for.
