#NUCLEAR SUBMARINE REACTOR MELTDOWN CRACKED#
#NUCLEAR SUBMARINE REACTOR MELTDOWN MOD#

In July, John Spellar, armed forces minister, told MPs: 'The repair work on HMS Tireless is a standard repair following a contained leak of coolant water in her reactor compartment.' The work, he added, would be completed 'in the autumn.'

#NUCLEAR SUBMARINE REACTOR MELTDOWN MOD#

This week, the MoD said it could not disclose what is wrong with the Tireless reactor 'without consulting the Americans first' - the reactor is based on an American design. He spoke to Thames Television after the MoD had persistently refused to answer questions from MPs on the grounds that they covered 'sensitive military areas'.

#NUCLEAR SUBMARINE REACTOR MELTDOWN CRACKED#

Polaris nuclear missile submarines were afflicted by reactor problems which turned out to be the same that crippled the navy's older fleet of hunter-killer submarines: cracked pipework in the primary cooling system.Īs far back as 1991, Reg Farmer, a member of the MoD's nuclear-powered warships safety committee, revealed that cracks had been found at the base of steam generators in the nuclear reactors. Yet the navy is not short of experience of problems with its submarines' nuclear reactors.

Equally alarmingly, navy sources say the splits in the pipes of the reactor's cooling system were discovered only because of new technology of which they had no previous experience. Naval engineers are said to have been astonished to discover the problem on the Tireless turned out to be so serious. That is to say, the MoD monitors the submarines the makers are not liable for any faults. The problem is compounded because the Ministry of Defence, not the manufacturers, Rolls-Royce, is the submarines' 'design authority'. They added: 'It is a very serious failure of the navy's inspection monitoring system. The critical junction of pipes where the welding fault was finally discovered had not been inspected since the first Swiftsure class submarines with this reactor design were built in the early 1970s, sources have revealed. Sources say the Tireless reactor was 'at the very point of failure' - in other words a meltdown. It is critical to safety,' the Guardian has been told. 'The cracks could not be in a worse position. What worries defence and nuclear sources is not what action was taken after the leak on the Tireless was eventually diagnosed - the recall of Britain's entire fleet of strike submarines - but why the initial leak, a symptom of what has turned out to be a much more devastating problem, was not discovered earlier. There is no doubt the navy treats the safety issue extremely seriously.

Nuclear submarine reactor meltdown