Nuclear scare at Navy submarine base after 'unbelievable' failures

A major nuclear incident was narrowly averted at the heart of Britain's Royal Navy submarine fleet, The Independent on Sunday can reveal. The failure of both the primary and secondary power sources of coolant for nuclear reactors at the Devonport dockyard in Plymouth on 29 July last year followed warnings in previous years of just such a situation.

Experts yesterday compared the crisis at the naval base, operated by the Ministry of Defence and government engineering contractors Babcock Marine, with the Fukushima Daiichi power-station meltdown in Japan in 2011.

Nuclear scare at Navy submarine base after 'unbelievable' failures

Scary what the media withholds from the people.

Okay.... Let me wrap my mind around this...

Operated under extremely tight security and secrecy, the Devonport nuclear repair and refuelling facility was built to maintain the new Vanguard ballistic missile submarines and is also home to the Trafalgar- and Astute-class attack submarines – both powered by nuclear reactors.

(Op Link)

It's 00:30 seconds to midnight on the big 'ol clock of doom with the numbers falling fast.....and a lets say whatever world events are, a British ballistic missile submarine is called on to..well, do what no one ever wants to do.

..in the shadows lurks a Russian sub, made just for the purpose of stopping that from happening ..when..they hear .....reactor alarms and a melt down in progress.

Umm.. Look on the bright side? The Russian attack sub may die laughing, anyway. They won't have fired a shot. Okay, quality really matters on some things... Just sayin'...

A couple possibilities come to mind here: either there actually are more nuclear near-accidents happening or they are just now being reported when they occur. Along with the Barksdale "missing" nukes and the recent story of the same down in Texas somewhere I'm inclined to think the former, and it's by design.
Government seems to thrive on incompetence - it provides cover for nefarious activities and works as a built-in excuse should they be caught red-handed. "these kinds of accidents happen all the time". Comforting, isn't it?
It also breaks down protocol and invites monkeying with the system. "let our experts review tehe situation and make recommendations". More funding seems to follow the same as a lack thereof can be blamed as the cause.
It works in every department, the worse job they do the more money and resources they throw at it. That's why government is so gargantuan today, it's a monument to failure.

We've all heard of Too big to fail.
Welcome to Too big to succeed.

Oh the wonders of nuclear power. The benefits and the security it provides.

Not just a problem in the UK. Russia has its own decaying fleet. Note the date on the article.

Rotting Russian Subs

reply to post by intrptr


Russia is a big problem

Russia announces enormous finds of radioactive waste and nuclear reactors in Arctic seas

From the article

The catalogue of waste dumped at sea by the Soviets, according to documents seen by Bellona, and which were today released by the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, includes some 17,000 containers of radioactive waste, 19 ships containing radioactive waste, 14 nuclear reactors, including five that still contain spent nuclear fuel; 735 other pieces of radiactively contaminated heavy machinery, and the K-27 nuclear submarine with its two reactors loaded with nuclear fuel.

How delightful of them.



King

I'm not entirely certain which is the bigger story, the incompetence at Plymouth, or that it was covered up for 14 months.

And then emerged without reference to the delay ...

I notice that the Independent on Sunday is remarkably coy regarding the origin of the information.
I would have thought they would be anxious to demonstrate its credibility.

On the positive side, they make a good argument in favour of regarding the press with the utmost suspicion.
I'm convinced.

The only real information I glean from this article, is that I have no idea what is going on.
And that's not exactly news.

mistersmith.

reply to post by kingears

Thanks for the journey down the rabbit hole of links in your reply...

Accordingly...

Information that the reactors about the K-27 could reachieve criticality and explode was released at the Bellona-Rosatom seminar in February.

Gulp

I predict that there will be accidents in the future. It's unavoidable. Many know the infrastructure is failing on lots of reactors, both above the water and in submarines now! They just do patch jobs to fix them up all the time. I think if there is going to be power generated by this means that it should be modernized for the 21st century to be FAIL PROOF. Good luck with getting that from the greedy corporations!

Edit: This however looks like it would be a design flaw. Scary.

I nearly thought that, this inexplicable anomaly happened 3 days ago.
From July, been quite a while this news came so late.
Nonetheless causes for these failures, should be remedied with utmost haste

reply to post by research3300


Lol you have to laugh at the concern they have over the prospect of having a "accident" like this when the ship is not even out of the yard. While, if war occurs, countries will be intentionally be trying to destroy these ships and release a far worse disaster.

Oh the irony.

Well, there's other ways of managing core cooling in those sub designs, other than depending on shore power to run the recirc pumps.

If it gets bad enough, the core will use thermosyphon cooling which doesn't require any power at all.

reply to post by research3300


One thing comes to mind. The Kursk. What happened to the reactor core? I remember that there were several explosions and yet the Russians managed to lift the wreckage from the bottom of the sea.
Would this be a different scenario if the UK Subs reactor core went critical?

reply to post by research3300


See, this is one of those times where I want to wave the banner of yesteryear and ask "why is the nuclear security of our nations navy submarine docks being left to a private company to deal with? Surely it should be a government affair, with no less than six times as much redundancy built in as there is currently for the system which is causing the messy pants scenario ?"

I'm sure there was a time when things of this importance were not run by a bunch of lackwits whose only qualifications are that they can work a Microsoft spreadsheet, turn it into a pie chart, and make the members of some corporate boardroom grin like maniacs before medication time. Perhaps it would be smart for our government to stop wasting money on private contracts (many of which are poorly written to such a degree that the public purse effectively gets stolen from every month), and start de-privatising these delicate and important locations.

Britain has had a navy in its history, which was the envy of the world, and it's operatives over the years have been some of the greatest innovators, and some of the nations greatest heros. It's been a while since the quality and reach of the navy here has been at its peak, and I must say that it seems as if the more our nation farms out the housekeeping as it were, to private contractors, the lower our entire armed forces seem to fall in terms of the efficacy of their kit, provision, logistics and safety.

This particular example is just one of many that highlight the error of allowing private interests to have a hand in any essential works for or on behalf of Her Majesties armed forces.

I understand from the article that the problem was caused by a failure of the mains power supply, compounded by the fact that the standby diesel generators were also not working.

If, as a nation, we can't keep the lights on, or maintain a diesel engine, in one of our key military establishments .......

What the hell are we doing monkeying around with nuclear power ?

mistersmith.

Wrabbit2000
Okay.... Let me wrap my mind around this...

Operated under extremely tight security and secrecy, the Devonport nuclear repair and refuelling facility was built to maintain the new Vanguard ballistic missile submarines and is also home to the Trafalgar- and Astute-class attack submarines – both powered by nuclear reactors.

(Op Link)

It's 00:30 seconds to midnight on the big 'ol clock of doom with the numbers falling fast.....and a lets say whatever world events are, a British ballistic missile submarine is called on to..well, do what no one ever wants to do.

..in the shadows lurks a Russian sub, made just for the purpose of stopping that from happening ..when..they hear .....reactor alarms and a melt down in progress.

Umm.. Look on the bright side? The Russian attack sub may die laughing, anyway. They won't have fired a shot. Okay, quality really matters on some things... Just sayin'...

Well, at least no deaths unlike USS Thresher, what a bungle that was, still, things have improved a lot since then, thankfully.

Kratos40
reply to post by research3300

 

One thing comes to mind. The Kursk. What happened to the reactor core? I remember that there were several explosions and yet the Russians managed to lift the wreckage from the bottom of the sea.
Would this be a different scenario if the UK Subs reactor core went critical?

I thought a Swedish consortium 'sawed' the sub into bits then lifted them?(the bits)

Whilst slightly concerning, one has to wonder just how much the Independent is either hyping or not telling, because each of those Submarines mentioned in the Article has their own emergency power generators on board as well, in case their own reactors should either shutdown or experience problems. I fail to see how in an emergency, these could not be utilised.

It has to be noted that the Independent, along with the Guardian, do tend to take the anti-nuclear stance.

Nuclear will be our downfall!

Not much else to add as I feel these Idiots are never going to listen.

Good place to put this story. Talking about scares...


KY mustard gas leak 2x's/ Officials say heats to blame

If they knew heat could or is the problem, why not store the gas at a temp. that would keep it from leaking? That's how you can tell their "lying " IMO..... stupid lie... If someone is hurt by an "Accidental" leak you would think they would get sued for knowing. Being Negligent.

With all the nuke news of top Nuke guy get's canned over "Gambling"... Other nuke guys getting replaced due to "low-confidence" in their abilities... Explosion in Ok... What the hell ?