Kromek

An advisory white paper released by academics and sector leaders, has warned of the need to learn lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic as the threat of nuclear incidents rises globally.

In response to the white paper, Tobias Elwood MP, chair of the Defence Select Committee, said: “Perhaps, with the war in Ukraine and Russian troops attacking nuclear power stations and Putin threatening nuclear attack it is timely to review our resilience to nuclear accidents and attacks.”

Rethinking our readiness for rapid response radiation monitoring in the face of nuclear incidents isauthored by Professor Tom B Scottof Bristol University, Nick Tomkinson, senior partner at Global Nuclear Security Partners Ltd. and Dr Arnab Basu, CEO of Kromek Group. It features a foreword by former Director General of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), Professor Michael Clarke.

The white paper makes several key recommendations to government:

• Public education campaign: During the Cold War the population was continually educated on the actions to take in order to survive in the event of a nuclear attack or accident. With threats back at Cold War levels, there must be a public information campaign.
• National methodology and local/regional coordination: There needs to be a national strategy that delivers a coherent response to a nuclear event, with national and local response going hand-in-hand. Local Resilience Forums need training, equipment and infrastructure to operate alongside a senior responsible officer within government to coordinate a comprehensive approach to pre-emptive resilience.
• Data gathering: It is important to have radiological data before and after an event to know what’s changed in near real time. The technology is now available, which was not in the Cold War, to have a network of static and roaming sensors networked to local and national resilience networks. Although the focus for strategic security has traditionally been on London and key strategic infrastructure, the methodology needs to be cascaded regionally, through the local resilience forums
• Nuclear waste management: An international ‘car park’, should be organised by the UN and located somewhere neutral, for all countries to deposit their nuclear material so it doesn’t go missing and is safely stored.

The white paper establishes that the recent invasion of Ukraine has escalated the risk of a nuclear incident to levels not seen since the Cold War, in several ways:

• Armed conflict near both active (Zaporizhzhia) and redundant (Chernobyl) nuclear energy facilities
• Belligerent rhetoric concerning the deployment of nuclear weapons
• Global ambition to reduce dependence on Russian fossil fuels, and, therefore, develop greater nuclear energy capacity, will lead to more reactors being constructed in developing countries, which are more vulnerable to civil war and/or extreme weather events and natural disasters.

The authors recognise that the Covid-19 pandemic highlighted global deficiencies in preparedness and stress the need for governments, considering growing risk, to take action now to ensure contingencies and safeguards are in place, should they become necessary. One such recommendation is for radiation detectors to be prioritised as a means of monitoring the dissemination and movement of radioactivity, facilitating its management and mitigation.

In his foreword to the paper, Professor Michael Clarke, who served as Director General of RUSI from 2007 to 2015, said: “Nuclear danger is back near the top of the international security agenda. When the Cold War came to an end the possibility that nuclear weapons might be used somewhere, sometime, seemed to recede.

“But we have all been rudely awakened to the greater dangers mankind is facing over the last decade, and particularly in our most recent turbulent years.

“The cooperative international framework actively to discourage the resort to weapons of mass destruction during conflicts – through arms control, treaty regimes, international law, and the force of global opinion – has been weakening all the time since the beginning of this century. It is now weaker than at any period in my own lifetime.

“Time is of the essence; to monitor the new dangers of nuclear proliferation, to meet climate change targets, to replace fossil fuel energy sources, to mobilise global opinion effectively by showing that scientific and technological solutions are within our grasp – and, therefore, that our political priorities should embrace the opportunities now on offer.”

Dr Arnab Basu, CEO of Kromek Group plc, one of the report’s authors, added: “The consequences as a result of events outlined in this white paper are unthinkable. While we are all becoming acutely aware of burgeoning risk, the general population is not well briefed on what to do if the worst were to happen.

“Only by taking action now on pre-emptive preparedness we can be resilient and continue to maintain UK’s position as a global leader in nuclear safety as the world turns increasingly to it for decarbonisation beyond this current threat.”

ENDS