Latest news with #Aldermaston
BBC News
08-08-2025
- General
- BBC News
AWE Aldermaston site safety procedures 'improved'
An atomic weapons site has improved procedures after an explosive component was damaged, the nuclear watchdog has Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) served an improvement notice to the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) site in Aldermaston, Berkshire in followed an incident when an explosive component was unintentionally damaged by workers assembling a unit for testing said it had conducted regular site visits and reviewed safety and AWE had "constructively and proactively engaged". The damage was caused when workers failed to follow appropriate procedures when manually handling the improvement notice required AWE to better plan, oversee and control activities in the Explosive Technology Centre at the site, which maintains and develops nuclear warheads, said there was no risk to the public or the environment from the Allmark, ONR's head of regulation for weapons sub-directorate, said: "The licensee has taken clear and coordinated action to address the identified shortfalls and we are satisfied that it has demonstrated compliance with the notice."ONR will continue its routine regulatory oversight of the stated mission is to protect society by securing safe nuclear nuclear regulator takes enforcement action when licensees are found to be failing to meet the safety and security standards required by can range from advice by inspectors to warnings, letters, improvement or prohibition notices, or prosecutions and instigating court proceedings. You can follow BBC Berkshire on Facebook, X (Twitter), or Instagram.
The Guardian
03-07-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on proscribing Palestine Action: blurring civil disobedience and terrorism is a dangerous step
When the Labour government introduced anti-terrorism legislation 25 years ago, it stressed that it was targeting extreme crimes. 'Terrorism involves the threat or use of serious violence for political, religious or ideological ends. It … aims to create a climate of extreme fear,' said Jack Straw, the then home secretary. Some MPs still feared that a group like Greenpeace, which had destroyed genetically modified crops and temporarily halted nuclear weapons production at Aldermaston, might be proscribed. Mr Straw reassured them that such bans would be used only when absolutely necessary; he knew of 'no evidence whatever' that the actions of the environmental group 'would fall remotely under [its] scope'. UN experts warned this week that 'acts of protest that damage property, but are not intended to kill or injure people, should not be treated as terrorism'. Yet on Wednesday, MPs voted – by 385 to 26 – to proscribe Palestine Action under the 2000 legislation. The Lords were expected to approve the order on Thursday. Unless a high court judge orders its suspension at a hearing on Friday, from Saturday, being a member of or simply expressing support for the group will carry a maximum penalty of 14 years. The ban was announced days after Palestine Action claimed responsibility for breaking into an RAF base and spraying paint on to planes that it claimed were supporting the Israeli military campaign. Four people have been charged. Hundreds of lawyers, cultural figures and groups such as Amnesty International have condemned the ban. It is lamentable that MPs backed it. But cynically listing two white-supremacist organisations on the same order – Maniacs Murder Cult, whose members have claimed violent attacks globally, and Russian Imperial Movement, which seeks to create a new Russian imperial state – made it harder for legislators to vote it down. The British state has plenty of legislation to deal with direct action. Palestine Action activists have been arrested and charged with criminal damage, violent disorder and burglary. The suspicion is that frequent acquittals have led to this order. Pouring paint over military aircraft and buildings, and tossing smoke bombs, does not sound like the kind of extreme act that the public rightly reviles as terrorism. Rather, the ban appears designed not only to silence supporters but to reduce public sympathy by placing the group on a par with Islamic State and the extreme-right group National Action. Yvette Cooper, the home secretary, alleges that Palestine Action's methods 'have become more aggressive, with its members demonstrating a willingness to use violence'. The public will need to see evidence of this – rather than take such claims on trust – if their faith in the state is not to be undermined. Palestine Action has targeted property to challenge a war in which tens of thousands of civilians have been killed. The group's protests embarrass the government: the UK continues to supply equipment to Israel's military as it slaughters Palestinians. Despite overwhelming evidence that war crime is piling on war crime in Gaza, and reportedly contrary to the advice of its own lawyers, the British government will not say that Israel has broken international law. The government should be doing all it can to end this conflict, not to criminalise protests against it. But you do not need to sympathise with Palestine Action's aims to believe that its proscription sets a chilling precedent and undermines democracy.
The Sun
27-06-2025
- General
- The Sun
We live in town building Britain's NUKES where mysterious ‘explosions' go off – we fear we're targets for war on UK soil
TERRIFIED villagers living in the shadow of Britain's top-secret nuclear weapons site say they feel like 'sitting ducks'. Residents in the sleepy village of Aldermaston, Berkshire, have spoken of their fear after hearing "mysterious explosions" from the neighbouring nuclear weapons facility AWE. 16 16 16 Living next to the Automatic Weapons Establishment - where the UK's most powerful bombs are designed - feels like being "on the front line", according to locals. They say their village would be targeted in the event of a nuclear or terrorist attack and have called on the Ministry of Defence to provide them with greater protection. The Sun can exclusively reveal that the state-owned site has agreed to launch a new emergency text alert system after mounting pressure from panicked neighbours. It comes after years of "mystery explosions", blaring sirens, and rumours of hazardous experiments behind the razor-wire fences – just yards from family homes. Business owner Kerry Thomas was one of the first to sign up to the text service that is due to come into operation in the next fortnight. The 45-year-old told The Sun: 'Everyone in the village was sent a letter by AWE telling us they wanted to share more communications with locals residents about what was going on at the site. 'We were invited to join a text service and the plan is that they will keep us posted about anything that is going on there, such as any planned security drills, or unusual events in and around the complex. "I think it is a great idea because it will stop people worrying or speculating every time they hear the sirens going off. "To be fair to AWE, they do seem to want to engage with the local community. 'I know they donate money for public events here in the village and they have hosted regular village hero award ceremonies. 'They have always worked with the village, rather than against it." Kerry admitted the growing global tensions and hostilities raging in the Middle East has made her nervous about hostile forces targeting her home town. Nuclear strikes, secret bunkers for Royals, & massive cyber attacks… how Britain is secretly bracing for war with Russia She said: 'Sure, we are right in the firing line here, but you have got to carry on living your life as best you can. "It was the same when the West was bombing Iraq years ago. 'There was a heightened risk of attack here, but we tried to go out about our lives as normal. 'Despite the extra risk associated with living somewhere like here, it's still a wonderful place to live." Kerry continued: "I have lived with what goes on here all my life, so it's all I know really. "You grow up knowing that if there is ever a nuclear war, we will be among the first to be hit. "We are in the middle of such beautiful countryside, yet really close to Reading and London. "I wouldn't live anywhere else.' She said she understands the need to invest extra billions in our defence capabilities and believes it is "money well spent". She added: "The UK has to keep up-to-date with modern nuclear technology. 16 16 "The way the world is now, it is simply a necessary evil. "We have to be well equipped with the best nuclear weapons in order to protect ourselves. "I wish it wasn't necessary, but in reality it is. "I try not to worry about it anymore and despite what people say about living next to a nuclear site, none of us here glow in the dark.' The government's recently-announced £15bn replacement for Britain's nuclear arsenal is being designed at the site. Earlier this month, Labour's John Healey became the first defence secretary to visit the AWE site since 2018. He told how Labour was making a generational decision to support expensive weapons that he hoped would protect the UK. He said: 'We've got a government recognising that we need to invest now if we're going to be able to maintain our strength of our independent UK nuclear deterrence in the decades to come. Labour's previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was heavily opposed to nuclear weapons. Operations have begun to scale up at Aldermaston with the initial phases of work on the new warhead under way. About 1,500 employees have joined AWE in the past year, bringing the total number of workers at the state-owned company to 9,500. Building surveyor Chris Robinson, 65, suggested that the text notifications did not go far enough to safeguard locals. 16 16 He called for the installation of an Israeli style defence shield like the Iron Dome at the 750-acre facility. He said: "I recognise that we need to have a strong nuclear capability because that is the only thing that is going to ensure world peace. "The existence of the concept of mutually assured destruction is ironically what keeps us all safe. "But I would like to see some kind of Iron Dome-style protection for the area because at the moment it feels like we are sitting ducks. "The AWE site would be a prime target for terrorists and we need to be better protected here." He recalled the recent break in at RAF Brize Norton by Palestine Action yobs in the neighbouring county of Oxfordshire as he called for greater measures to be put in place. Chris added: 'You only have to look at the break-in down the road last week to see how easy it is for someone who is determined enough to get into these complexes. 'Can you imagine the damage someone could do if they were to get inside the base at AWE with explosives strapped around them? 'I worry that idiotic leaders like Donald Trump are making the world a less and less safe place. "That kind of reinforces the need for all countries to have the best nuclear bombs because that international nuclear deterrent is what keeps us all safe in the end. 'I've never been inside the base but I hate the look of it from the outside. "It has lots of very ugly buildings. It's a shame they don't screen it a bit better with trees. 16 16 16 'It does feel a bit weird that I'm living right next to a nuclear plant, but I guess it's got to be somewhere." Components for Britain's nuclear warhead – known as Holbrook – are designed, tested and built at Aldermaston. The warheads themselves are largely assembled at the nearby Burghfield site, before being transported by road to Coulport, in Scotland. The assembly process is completed there and the Trident missiles, with their British warheads, are loaded on to submarines at nearby Faslane. Aimee Kirkpatrick, 20, who has lived in the village all her life, told how regular practice drills often send the villagers into a frenzy. She explained: 'Almost every week, sirens will go off at the base. "It's very scary for those of us who live here because we never know if it's a practice drill or the real thing. 'If a nuclear bomb is ever going to be dropped on the UK, and I hope to God it never is, I'd much rather be right underneath it when it lands than die painfully over time from the fall-out. 'I accept we live somewhere that's going to be a prime target, but my life is here so I don't want to move away.' Aimee, who works at a local pub while studying for a marketing degree, said many of her friends from school are now apprentices at AWE. She said: 'They love working there because the company is actually a really good employer. "The pay is good and they're learning interesting stuff. 16 16 16 "One of them is involved in nuclear physics, which must be a pretty cool apprenticeship to be doing.' The new nuclear device, called Astraea, will not be ready for deployment until the 2030s or 2040s. It will be designed at Aldermaston, principally using small test explosions, which are then extrapolated by an onsite supercomputer to simulate a nuclear blast. Its explosive power is not yet known, though independent experts think it will probably be more than the 80-100kt Holbrook, and possibly closer to 475kt, a benchmark set by the most powerful US warhead. For comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which killed between 70,000 and 140,000 people (estimates vary widely), was 15kt. 16
The Guardian
22-06-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘No danger of blowing up Reading': the site building UK's next nuclear weapons
Nestled in the heart of rural Berkshire, the 300-hectare (750-acre) military complex at Aldermaston is an incongruous sight. It comprises a mix of 1950s and 1960s institutional buildings, heated by a steam tube system more familiar in Soviet structures, and a handful of modern offices, several of which are in the process of being built. But the technology inside the complex, one of Britain's most sensitive defence locations, is far from that era of cold-war hostility. The sprawling campus is the largest of three locations where Britain manufactures its nuclear warheads – and where the UK will design and build a £15bn replacement for its current arsenal without making a single explosive test. Armed police with carbine rifles patrol and watch from the rooftops, protecting the nuclear materials and the site's 7,500 employees. The staff work for AWE, the former Atomic Weapons Establishment, whose project is at the heart of Labour plans to revitalise nuclear with weaponry that may last to the 2070s. On Thursday, John Healey became the first defence secretary to visit the site since 2018, arguing that Labour was making a generational decision to support expensive weapons that he and other members of the government hoped would protect the UK by never coming close to being used. 'We've got a government recognising that we need to invest now if we're going to be able to maintain our strength of our independent UK nuclear deterrence in the decades to come,' Healey said, wondering aloud why some of his immediate Conservative predecessors had not come to visit. Labour's previous leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was opposed to nuclear weapons, but under Keir Starmer the party firmly shifted to the pro-nuclear camp long before winning the election. It is now pressing forward with civil nuclear development, giving the go-ahead this month for a new £14.2bn reactor at Sizewell, in Suffolk, as well as the next nuclear bomb. Ministers' commitment to nuclear is one they believe has public backing. At a time of global uncertainty, not least with Israel attacking Iran to prevent the latter acquiring its own nuclear bomb, public support for the UK to maintain its stock of nuclear weapons is growing, they say. Polling conducted by YouGov on behalf of the Ministry of Defence suggests support for Trident, the submarine-based nuclear weapons system, rose to 65% in March 2025, the highest level since sampling for the department began in 2018. Components for Britain's nuclear warhead – known as Holbrook – are designed, tested and built at Aldermaston. The warheads themselves are largely assembled at the nearby Burghfield site, before being transported by road to Coulport, in Scotland. The assembly process is completed there and the Trident missiles, with their British warheads, are loaded on to submarines at nearby Faslane. Operations have begun to scale up at Aldermaston with the initial phases of work on the new warhead under way. About 1,500 employees have joined AWE in the past year, bringing the total number of workers at the state-owned company to 9,500. These are the kind of skilled jobs Labour is eager to talk up. The new device, called Astraea, will not be ready for deployment until the 2030s or 2040s. Its explosive power is not yet known, though independent experts think it will probably be more than the 80-100kt Holbrook, and possibly closer to 475kt, a benchmark set by the most powerful US warhead. For comparison, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which killed between 70,000 and 140,000 people (estimates vary widely), was 15kt. 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 It will be designed at Aldermaston, principally using small test explosions which are then extrapolated by an onsite supercomputer, Damson, to simulate a nuclear blast. One engineer said Damson used 17MW of power, considerably more than the Met Office's supercomputer, which consumes 2.7MW, and AWE says it can perform 4.3 million billion calculations per second. The other key facility on the site is Orion, a set of 12 lasers that, when brought together, can simulate the moment a nuclear bomb is detonated. One scientist said the energy involved was 'no greater than boiling a teaspoon of water' and there was 'no danger of blowing up Reading'. In any event, the lasers come together in a vacuum to safeguard against any possible explosions. Materials intended for the warhead are tested in the laser to see how they will behave when the bomb is blown, though the amounts involved are minute, often a few millimetres in size. To see if they can prepare the experiments, staff members are asked to build a tiny model of a bicycle, with handlebars and spokes. It is not a task for everybody; after six months some employees can manage but others cannot. The question, though, is why a £15bn investment in a new nuclear warhead is necessary, because Holbrook warheads, if regularly refurbished, could continue to be viable. One reason for the upgrade is that the US is designing a new warhead, the W93. The UK and US programmes have operated in parallel, sharing design features to save money, but not fissile materials (plutonium or enriched uranium), which would breach the nuclear non-proliferation treaty to which both countries are signatories. A second reason, said David Cullen, a nuclear expert at the Basic thinktank, was for 'the UK to maintain its position as a member of the nuclear club'. The issue is partly one of skills: 'The capability to deploy warheads atrophies if you don't have warhead designers who have actually made a nuclear bomb,' he added. But that is the cost, in other words, of the UK maintaining a seat near the top of the diplomatic table.
Sky News
20-06-2025
- Politics
- Sky News
Inside Britain's largest nuclear weapons site - as scientists race to build a new warhead by the 2030s
Vaults of enriched uranium and plutonium to make nuclear bombs are dotted about a secure site in Berkshire along with Anglo-Saxon burial mounds and a couple of lakes. Surrounded by metal fences topped with barbed wire, much of the nuclear weapons facility at Aldermaston in Berkshire looks frozen in time from the 1950s rather than ready for war in the 21st century. But a renewed focus on the importance of the UK's nuclear deterrent means the government is giving much of its nuclear infrastructure a facelift as it races to build a new warhead by the 2030s when the old stock goes out of service. Sky News was among a group of news organisations given rare access to the largest of Britain's nuclear weapons locations run by AWE. The acronym stands for Atomic Weapons Establishment - but a member of staff organising the visit told me that the public body, which is owned by the Ministry of Defence, no longer attributes the letters that make up its name to those words. "We are just A, W, E," she said. She did not explain why. Perhaps it is to avoid making AWE's purpose so immediately obvious to anyone interested in applying for a job but not so keen on weapons of mass destruction. For the scientists and engineers, working here though, there seems to be a sense of genuine purpose as they develop and ensure the viability and credibility of the warheads at the heart of the UK's nuclear deterrent, this country's ultimate security guarantee. "It's nice to wake up every day and work on something that actually matters," said a 22-year-old apprentice called Chris. Sky News was asked not to publish his surname for security reasons. The workforce at AWE is expanding fast, with 1,500 new people joining over the past year. The organisation has some 9,500 employees in total, including about 7,000 at Aldermaston, where the warhead is developed and its component parts are manufactured. Designing and building a bomb is something the UK has not needed to do for decades - not since an international prohibition on testing nuclear weapons came into force in the 1990s. It means the new warhead, called Astrea, will not be detonated for real unless it is used - an outcome that would only ever happen in the most extreme of circumstances as explained in a new podcast series by Sky News and Tortoise called The Wargame. The last time, Britain test-fired a bomb was at a facility in Nevada in the US in 1991. With that no longer an option, the scientists at AWE must rely on old data and new technology as they build the next generation of warhead. This includes input from a supercomputer at the Aldermaston site that uses 17 megawatts of power and crunches four trillion calculations per second. Another major help is a giant laser facility. It is built in a hall, with two banks of long cylinders, lying horizontal and stacked one of top of the other running down the length of the room - these are part of the laser. The beams are then zapped in a special, separate chamber, onto tiny samples of material to see how they react under the kind of extreme pressures and temperatures that would be caused in a nuclear explosion. The heat is up to 10 million degrees - the same as the outer edge of the sun. "You take all those beams at a billionth of a second, bring them altogether and heat a small target to those temperatures and pressures," one scientist said, as he explained the process to John Healey, the defence secretary, who visited the site on Thursday. Looking impressed, Mr Healey replied: "For a non-scientist that is hard to follow let alone comprehend." The Orion laser facility is the only one of its kind in the world, though the US - which has a uniquely close relationship with the UK over their nuclear weapons - has similar capabilities. Maria Dawes, the director of science at AWE, said there is a sense of urgency at the organisation about the need to develop and then build the new bomb - which is a central part of the government's new defence review published in early June. "You've probably read the strategic defence review," she said. "There's very much the rhetoric of this is a new era of threat and therefore it's a new era for defence and AWE is absolutely at the heart of that and so a sense of urgency around: we need to step up and we need to make sure that we've got what our customer needs. Yes, there's very much that sense here." It means an organisation that has for years been purely focused on ensuring the current stockpile of warheads is safe and works must shift to becoming more dynamic as it pursues a project that will be used to defend the UK long into the future. In a sign of its importance, the government is spending £15bn over the next four years alone on the programme to build the new warheads. Part of the investment is going into revamping Aldermaston. Driving around the 700-acre site, which was once a Second World War airbase, many of the buildings were constructed into the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. The construction of new science and research laboratories is taking place. But bringing builders onto one of the UK's most secure nuclear sites is not without risk. Everyone involved must be a British national and armed police patrols are everywhere. No one would say what will be different about the new bomb that is being developed here compared with the version that needs replacing. One official simply said the incumbent stock has a finite design life and will need to be swapped out.
