nuclear-news

Letter to New First Minister over South Wales Nuclear Overflights

 https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/letter-to-new-first-minister-over-south-wales-nuclear-overflights/ 10th September 2024

With the recent election of Dame Eluned Morgan, the NFLA Secretary has written to the new Welsh First Minister to ask for action on the flights carrying nuclear materials over South Wales.

Cardiff City Councillor Sue Lent, Chair of the Welsh NFLAs, first wrote to Dame Eluned’s predecessor Vaughan Gething at the end of April drawing attention to the carriage of nuclear materials by

RAF aircraft passing over the heavily populated cities of South Wales enroute from the USA to Brize Norton.

In that letter we asked First Minister Gething, as Chair of the Wales Resilience Forum, with responsibility for emergency planning across the nation, to seek a reassurance from the MoD / RAF that such flights will be diverted out to sea, well away from South Wales municipalities and revisit emergency planning arrangements for any accident involving these special nuclear materials.

After two reminders were sent to the First Minister’s Office, a reply was finally received on 5 August, the day before Dame Eluned replaced him in office. Unfortunately, that letter stated that whilst some preparation for the possibility of an aircraft accident had been made by first responders, ‘the issues you raise with respect to flight paths and nuclear related policies are reserved matters for the UK Government’

We also wrote to the Defence Nuclear Organisation asking them whether any emergency planning exercises had been held in Wales since Exercise Astral Bend in 2011, and we also requested any assessments of those exercises. As per usual the military denied our Freedom of Information requests suggesting that the Welsh NFLAs had a nefarious purpose in seeking to undermine national security and the efficiency of our armed forces when our concern was for the safety of the people of Wales. The only thing they would tell us is that a further exercise had been held on 21 September 2023, ironically the UN International Day of Peace.

We have now written to Dame Eluned Morgan asking her to take up the two ‘asks’ that we made of her predecessor. When we have her reply then the correspondence will be published in full in a future NFLA Briefing.

September 13, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, UK