Updated report on submarine hulks (10 May 2000)
"The admiralty decided - God bless it - to go into nuclear propulsion for submarines in the early 1950s .. There were quite enough problems to contemplate at that time without thinking too much about what on earth we should do with it when we were finished with it".
- statement by J Peters, Under Secretary of State for Defence, to the House of Commons Defence Committee
Scrapped submarines at Devonport
Scrapped submarines at Rosyth
Nuclear waste in scrapped submarines
Plans for long term disposal
Reactor problems on old Polaris submarines
The largest ever nuclear accident exercise took place at Faslane in November 1997 - Exercise Short Sermon.
Much more information on the problems at Devonport isavailable from Plymouth nuclear Dump Information Group
Nuclear waste from decommissioned submarines
After the used fuel has been removed the following amounts of nuclear waste will remain from each one of these submarines:
18 tonnes of long lived intermediate waste
This includes the cladding on the reactor pressure vessel which is made of stainless steel and may need machining to remove. Separation of this from the rest of the reactor pressure vessel would be a difficult job even by remote equipment. Separation would mean that workers would be exposed to radiation. This it the most dangerous material left after the fuel has been removed.
56 tonnes of short lived intermediate waste
This includes the reactor pressure vessel, the large thin walled primary shield tank which surrounds the pressure vessel and areas of the hull and bulkhead.
140 tonnes of low level waste
This comes from the primary coolant circuit, the hull and the submarine bulkhead next to the reactor. The coolant circuit is contaminated with radioactive crud.
Defence Secretary Michael Portillo has said that this waste will be packaged up and put into the underground nuclear waste store which is planned by NIREX for Cumbria. However it is not at all clear that this facility will ever be constructed. There are serious concerns that fissures in the rocks would lead to radiation leaking out over the long periods of time involved in storage.
If the underground store is delayed the waste may be removed from the submarines and packaged somewhere, possibly on site in the dockyards, until the store is ready. Alternatively the MoD may still be considering removing the whole reactor compartment and storing it on land.
Basically the MoD still do not appear to know what they will do with the huge quantities of nuclear waste which the nuclear powered submarine programme will leave behind.
This issue was reported in the "Scotland on Sunday" newspaper on 1 Dec 96.
Further information is available on the safety of nuclear submarines.
The seriousness of the problems with all the older British nuclear powered submarines was indicated in the diaries of Alan Clark, who at the time was a junior defence minister. It appears that Mrs Thatcher overruled her nuclear safety advisers. Mr Clark's entry for 31 Jan 1990 says:
".. news is about to break concerning the trouser-leg fractures in Warspite's cooling system. This could affect every nuclear-powered submarine. The whatever-it-is Authority have already given their advice that we should "cease to operate" them until the condition is "rectified".
"..TK, quite rightly in my view, is continuing to keep the newer ones on station (although whether this is really his decision or was forced on him by the Lady I simply don't know). I suspect the latter because when, sadistically, I rattled him at a meeting, "If - if there is an accident, it's not just you who resigns; the Government falls", he didn't blench." (TK is Tom King the defence Minister)
The Government continued to deploy Polaris submarines on patrol from January 1990 to May 1996, knowing that there was a serious defect affecting their nuclear reactors. From 1990 through 1992 they were using these boats when they didn't even know exactly what the problem was. Scottish CND were repeatedly told by a number of sources that there was a serious chance of a Chernobly style accident on a nuclear submarine. There were serious problems with 2 of the 3 patrols carried out by HMS Renown after its last refit. These resulted in the vessel being effectively withdrawn from patrols and kept at Faslane for 18 months before it was scrapped.