Safety ban on crucial maintenance at Berkshire’s Burghfield nuclear weapon factory stops transportation of Trident warheads to and from Faslane and Coulport

In what is believed to be a first, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) has had to cease work on nuclear weapons at Burghfield in Berkshire. The plant houses some of the most sensitive and dangerous processes in maintaining the Trident system – in operations cells known as ‘Gravel Gerties’, described below.

The Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), responsible for running Burghfield, has had to stop ‘live nuclear work’ while safety problems whose deadlines have passed are addressed. This situation has been the case since December 2007, if not before. For the past six years, management of elderly bomb dismantling facilities have been working to get on terms with more than 1,000 safety shortfalls identified by the Nuclear Installations Inspectorate (NII).

This month saw an NII report posted online and covering its regulation of AWE from October to December 2007. The report discloses that some of the safety issues have not been resolved and declares that: ‘AWE has agreed that no live nuclear work will be carried out until the necessary fixes are done’. It also makes clear that of fifty nine inspections made in the last quarter of 2007 at Burghfield and its sister establishment at Aldermaston, only two inspections found the facilities ‘good’. Forty three found them to be ‘adequate’ and fourteen reported ‘potential problems identified’.

Neither the AWE nor the MOD would talk to the media about either the details or the implications of the action taken. Outside specialists quoted by The Herald say that it is unprecedented and could have knock on effects at Coulport and Faslane, where nuclear warheads are stored and installed in submarines. An AWE spokesman said: ‘At no time has the safety of operations at Burghfield been in question’.
John Ainslie, Co-ordinator of the Scottish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament is quoted as saying: ‘This will delay the Navy’s plan to overhaul the weapons that are based at Faslane and Coulport. It illustrates that there is no safe way to assemble or store these weapons of mass destruction’.

Spokeswoman Di McDonald from the Nuclear Information Service in Southampton indicated that around 140 warheads at Coulport will have to stay there, with those unloaded from submarines returning from patrol stacking up. She argues that priority should be given to dismantling old weapons rather than producing new ones.

‘Gravel Gerties’ (whose name is taken from a character in the Dick Tracy comics in the 1950s) are circular underground operations rooms where technicians dismantle old nuclear warheads to check them before reassembly. Overhead are roofs of several metres of gravel which, in the event of an explosion, are designed to collapse inwards, dropping the gravel to buffer the plutonium from being hurled into the air. The United States is concerned abut the risk of plutonium release if the explosion does not collapse the gravel roof. Documents obtained in 2007 under the Freedom of Information Act show that the 1,000 ‘shortfalls’ concerning the NII relate to equipment and procedures at the Gravel Gerties. These include flaws in roofs, fire dampers, doors, hoists, cables, valves and gas cylinders.