BRITAIN'S top-secret nuclear warhead factory has been at risk of a catastrophic nuclear accident numerous times in the past 12 months, an Observer investigation can reveal. The plant at Aldermaston, Berkshire, has broken safety guidelines so many times that nuclear experts believe only luck has prevented an accident worse than that in Japan last month. The Observer has obtained confidential internal documents from the privatised Atomic Weapons Establishment which runs the site, a few miles from Reading and less than 50 miles from London. These reveal a frightening catalogue of dangerous accidents, breakdowns in safety procedures and environmental contamination. In total there have been more than 100 breaches of safety.
Since February, there have been eight breaches of 'criticality' rules, including two last month. These stringent rules are in place to ensure that too much uranium or plutonium does not collect together and trigger nuclear fission as happened in Japan.
The documents also reveal that there have been eight incidents of environmental contamination outside the site in the past year. In September, for instance, samples of groundwater outside the base 'indicate highly enriched uranium contamination'.
Some of the most serious of the breaches include:
- In April, part of the system to protect the bomb factory from a lightning strike that could trigger a nuclear explosion was found to be 'locked off and fuses removed';
- In May, a power failure outside Aldermaston led to 'widespread disruption onsite' after emergency generators failed. A number of critical processes require continuous power to maintain safety;
- In March, all the specialised fire pumping appliances which are critical to deal with an emergency were found to be 'unfit for service';
- In January, insulating material within the roof of a building where a fire would be a disaster was 'found to comprise compressed straw and brown paper'
- In September, an electri cian using unsafe equipment was found in 'close proximity to explosive powder'. A trail of powder led to large container full of 'additional explosive which no one present knew about'.
In eight other instances this year, the Atomic Weapons Establishment incorrectly labelled or packaged highly dangerous materials. In March, 'unexpected' contents were found in an explosive container and last month a 'can [of] plutonium was wrongly identified'.
There have also been a number of fires on site, the most serious one being under an 'occupied Portakabin' close to the building where the nuclear material is worked on.
John Large, an independent nuclear expert, said: 'Some of these breaches are absolutely astonishing and give very serious cause for concern. As well as the highly dangerous breaches of criticality rules, there are very worrying signs that the site could not fend for itself in an emergency.'
William Peden, of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, said: 'It is now horrifyingly clear that Aldermaston is unsafe. Production must immediately stop and we urgently need a full and independent public inquiry.' Martin Salter, the MP for Reading West, also demanded a public inquiry.
John Crofts, the director of safety at Aldermaston, confirmed the incidents but played down the seriousness.
'We have a strong culture of safety and we encourage our staff to report every incident, however minor. While we are concerned about breaches, none of these presented any hazard to the public.'
But the source, a senior employee at Aldermaston, says the 'general pattern is lax supervision by management focused on profit, a disinterested workforce with very low levels of technical knowledge and a great deal of luck'.
The nuclear scare that paralysed Japan could have happened here - anytime in the last year. Antony Barnett reports on Britain's weapons establishment that is one step from disaster.
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A LITTLE blue pamphlet is regularly delivered to homes surrounding Britain's secret atomic warhead factory at Aldermaston in Berkshire. Running to 11 pages, it lists the measures people living near by should take in the event of a nuclear accident, including stern warnings to stay in doors and listen to the radio. Not that the locals have any real reason to fear: it reassures them 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.
Today The Observer provides proof that this confidence is indeed misplaced and all is not well inside Aldermaston.
We reveal an appalling catalogue of more than 100 errors and safety breaches in the past 12 months, as well as details of an incident in 1993 that 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 Reading.
In September 1993, senior nuclear scientists at Aldermaston were struggling to contain a crisis. Shavings of highly enriched uranium - one of the most dangerous substances known to mankind - had been discov ered 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 realised that one false move could trigger an atomic fission explosion leading to nuclear catastrophe.
It only takes a few hundredths of a gramme 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 an explosion sending clouds of radioactive material into the air.
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 nerve-racking. A team of highly specialised nuclear engineers had to inject the oil tank with boron gas, which stabilises 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. A45 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 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 Labour Government sent Sir Edward Pochin, a radiologist from Harwell, to the site in 1978 to conduct an inquiry into safety.
Pochin's report was scathing and detailed 73 recommendations for changes. The full report has never been publicly released but one of his criticisms was 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's report into Aldermaston published this month found that that the Atomic Weapons Establishment 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 about which 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 about the dangers of tritium some studies have linked high tritium discharges to cancers and birth deformities such as Down's syndrome. Still, according to CND, the discharge was kept secret for so long on the grounds of 'national security'.
Many of 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 (who analyses some of the more serious incidents in the panel above) 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 stations breached' and a photographer nearly set off a large explosion at Burghfield by bringing a metal tripod into an area for high explosives.
Metal materials are not allowed near explosives 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 252 fires plus explosions and radioactive leaks and the report concluded that many of Pochin's recommendations had not been fully implemented.
Labour's then defence 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 Helena Kennedy QC.
She heard 12 hours of evidence over two days from 45 witnesses, including representatives of the Atomic Weapons Establishment, as well as Dr Carol Barton, consultant haematologist at the Royal Berkshire Hospital, who revealed that children living in the Aldermaston and Burghfield areas showed more than twice the average level of leukaemia.
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 privatisation of AWE, putting the management of the Aldermaston and Burghfield sites under private contractor Hunting Brae.
In 1997, the Health and Safety Executive 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 today's revelations in The Observer, it is hard to escape the conclusion that what was true in 1997 is still true today.
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THE OBSERVER asked independent nuclear engineer John Large to comment on the Atomic Weapons Establishment's reports of 10 out of more than 100 incidents over the past year.
15/1/99 Insulating material in roof found to be compressed straw and paper.
JL: A very high fire risk in a nuclear materials area.
24/12/98 Nine facilities over Christmas allowed regulatory stack filters to exceed deployment times.
JL: This may have had an environmental discharge im-pact, that if the filters 'blocked', then radioactive particulate matter could have escaped into the atmosphere - really poor and ill-disciplined maintenance management.
9/2/99 Employee entered exclusion area without appropriate protection.
JL: Probably not wearing respiratory protection, but this incident defined by AWE as not reportable, whereas it would be reportable at any other nuclear installation.
3/3/99 Ongoing defects found with pressurised air suits after operations in radioactive areas.
JL: These suits are the first (and last) line of protection for personnel in contaminated areas - strange that defects are ongoing.
3/3/99 Unexpected contents found in an explosive container, resulting in the area being evacuated.
JL: Astonishing!
22/3/99 All fire fighting pumping appliances at Alder maston unfit for service.
JL: Incredible - setting aside its nuclear weapons function, the industrial and radio-chemical processes undertaken at Aldermaston are hazardous and risky.
27/4/99 Surge protectors (part of lightning protection system) found to have been locked off and fuses removed.
JL: A fully assembled nuclear weapon is susceptible to risk of electro-magnetic surges (from lightning) which could, conceivably, trigger the conventional high-explosive charges that initiate the nuclear sequence.
19/5/99 Power failure offsite caused widespread disruption to electrical supplies on site.
JL: This could be extremely serious, because a number of processes require continuous power to maintain stability and/or safety - this is quite astonishing for such a hazardous plant. What will happen at Y2K when it is believed the National Grid will be very susceptible to blackouts?
14/5/99 Electrical power failure resulted in loss of emergency phone extensions.
JL: Again, astonishingly, suggests that this high-tech and hazardous plant cannot survive a power blackout unscathed - a power blackout is the time when emergency phones will most likely be required.
1/9/99 Non-routine groundwater samples indicate HEU contamination on Blacks land adjacent to A18 manhole.
JL: I cannot recall this being publicly reported.
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