Placeholder Image

字幕列表 影片播放

  • This is Faslane.

  • It's a military naval base in Scotland, and it's best known for

  • being home to the United Kingdom's four nuclear-armed submarines located here.

  • One submarine is always on patrol to provide a constant at-sea deterrent.

  • A recent report found that this area in red, which covers much of the base,

  • is at risk of flooding due to rising sea levels and storm surges.

  • If true, it would make flooding the biggest threat to the U.K.'s national security.

  • Behind me is the home of four Vanguard-class submarines.

  • They're armed with thermonuclear warheads, and together

  • they form the United Kingdom's nuclear deterrent.

  • The U.K. Ministry of Defence says their purpose is to discourage 

  • the most significant dangers to British national security.

  • But the deterrent may be under threat, not from an enemy nation

  • or a terrorist group, but from climate change.

  • No environmental disaster touches more people than flooding

  • and climate change projections indicate it's only going to get worse.  

  • Between 2000 and 2018, at least 255 million people were directly affected

  • by a large flooding event. The proportion of the global 

  • population affected by flooding increased by about 20 percent between 2000 and 2015.

  • That's 58 to 86 million more people experiencing the devastation of

  • everything they know going underwater.

  • Southeast Asia, home to many low-lying urban areas,

  • has the highest concentration of population exposed to floods by far.

  • Outside of Asia, the U.K. is one of the most vulnerable regions

  • with six million people at risk of floods.

  • Infrastructure is at risk too.

  • The U.K.'s Environment Agency recently stated that even if the country hits its net-zero targets by 2050,

  • summer temperatures will get up to 7.4˚C hotter, rainfall in winter will increase by 59%, 

  • and sea-level events that used to happen once every century

  • will be expected every year instead.  

  • The key issue that we all cumulatively face is climate change.

  • And in that sense, it poses the kinds of problems that past politics and past

  • military strategies seem unable to resolve.

  • Paul Dorfman is a senior research fellow at

  • University College London's energy institute and founder of the Nuclear Consulting Group.

  • He's written a report on the climate's impact on the U.K.'s nuclear military.

  • All of the models or predictions, all of the analysis, all of the data

  • has really begun to run hot.

  • It's good that people are taking notice, but it's bad that this new data, is showing us that we

  • really do need to get our act together.

  • According to the report, coastal flooding

  • frequency is estimated to increase by a factor of between 10 and more than

  • 100 in several European locations.

  • One of those locations is Scotland.

  • Its mainland and numerous islands

  • make up more than eleven and a half thousand miles of coastline.

  • One small but important stretch of that coastline is located 25 miles

  • northwest of the city of Glasgow. Her Majesty's Naval Base Clyde, located

  • at Faslane, is the headquarters of the Royal Navy in Scotland,

  • as well as the home port for the U.K.'s nuclear deterrent fleet.

  • The base was first used during the second world war, but it was only when the U.S.

  • and the U.K. signed a missile systems agreement in the 1960s, during the height of the Cold War,

  • that it contained nuclear submarines.

  • So how has the U.K.'s nuclear deterrent

  • developed since then, and what is its relevance in today's world?

  • Professor Andrew Futter is Director of Research for Politics and International

  • Relations at the University of Leicester.

  • By the end of the 1950s, and particularly the 1960s, there was a move, certainly in

  • the U.K. to rely much more on submarines as the main way of deploying nuclear weapons.

  • Simply because submarines were seen as the most secure and safe way to house them.

  • If you have a nuclear-powered, very quiet, nuclear-powered submarine

  • on patrol hidden in the depths of the ocean somewhere,

  • it is very hard for an adversary to target it to strike it to knock it out.

  • Therefore, there is always the risk if somebody attacks you that you can retaliate.

  • I think Faslane and Scotland became a site of choice initially because

  • it would be used by the United States and their submarine force as a base in Europe.

  • But it has a number of very useful natural advantages.

  • It's very deep water.

  • There are a number of different ways to get out to the ocean very quickly, which makes

  • it very hard for an adversary that wants to track or find those submarines to do so.  

  • But some believe, the force's biggest adversary today is climate change.

  • This is an aerial map of a sea inlet called Gare Loch and HMNB Clyde.

  • The blue area is the current waterbody, but by 2050,

  • this additional area in red would also be below the water level.

  • This would mean that a number of fixed jetties, submarine infrastructures,

  • an oil depot and several other buildings would be below water.

  • Faslane is not the only Royal Navy base under threat.

  • Across Gare Loch is the Royal Naval Armaments Depot Coulport,

  • where they process and store nuclear warheads.

  • Some of the base's support facilities would be exposed to flooding by 2050.  

  • And there are more.

  • Sellafield on the Cumbrian coast is Europe's largest nuclear site and holds 

  • the world's biggest stockpile of untreated nuclear waste.

  • Next-generation nuclear-powered Dreadnaught

  • submarines are being built at a shipyard in Barrow-in-Furness.

  • The naval base Devonport Royal Dockyard is the Navy's sole nuclear repair and refueling facility.

  • And the Rosyth Dockyard on the east coast of Scotland is primarily used to

  • dismantle and decommission nuclear submarines.

  • The near term risk is not simply sea level rise

  • but a thing called storm surge, which is when certain atmospheric conditions happen.

  • It makes the sea level itself rise, and then rush on to the land.

  • The evidence is beginning to come in,

  • that these places are surprisingly vulnerable, and will be of no help at all.

  • According to the Global Extreme Sea-Level Analysis, the magnitude and frequency of

  • extreme sea levels which cause storm surges and catastrophic flooding has accelerated worldwide.

  • A storm surge is an abnormal rise in water generated by, you guessed it, a storm.

  • And when a storm surge coincides with typical high tides,

  • it can result in huge storm tides reaching up to 20 feet or more.

  • But is this the case for Faslane, one of the most highly protected areas in the country?

  • I went to Brunel University to meet Dr. Phil Collins, an expert in geology & geotechnical

  • engineering to find out how serious the threat of flooding is to the naval base.

  • First of all, the storm surge threat is very real.

  • So if you get a large storm coming in, to some extent,

  • the pressure change will cause the sea level to rise up just on its own.

  • But then also the wave action as well compile water up into

  • shallow water areas like lochs. So it is a credible risk area.

  • Potentially more extreme storms, but almost certainly more storms.

  • You've done some research around  that area in the past many years ago.

  • Tell us a little bit about that area geologically.

  • If you go back 20,000 years or so ago, there was quite a large ice cap sitting on top of Scotland.

  • The weight of that is pushed down on the Earth's crust in the past.

  • And that now is reversing because the ice disappeared -the whole region

  • around Faslane has been moving upwards.

  • So when those ice sheets disappeared, you get this fairly rapid initial sea-level rise.

  • So that sea level is rising, the land is rising, and you get an interaction between the two.

  • Over the recent time, the balance between the land going up and the sea going up has changed.

  • And now the sea level is rising faster than the land, which is something that has worried quite a

  • lot of people because it was assumed that Scotland was going up and it would be safe, but it isn't.

  • So the predictions are that within the next 100 years or so, we've got somewhere between

  • probably about 30 centimeters to up to a meter of sea-level rise.

  • In terms of Faslane itself, the base is built

  • largely on a fairly low-lying area, but it already has quite a lot of existing flood infrastructure.

  • The engineering has taken a very pessimistic view on what might happen.

  • So they are engineered for earthquakes at a scale that we have very little evidence of

  • earthquakes like that for thousands of years.

  • They're also engineered for tsunami risk, and for storm surge risk.

  • Going forward, if sea level does rise by a meter, then that has to be reassessed.

  • Because obviously, if you've got a meter high,

  • increasing water, and then a storm surge on top, then areas that were safe are now exposed.

  • Is climate change the reason for these rising sea levels?

  • So we know a lot of glaciers are melting.

  • But on top of that, we've seen a documented increase in temperature

  • globally over about the last 150 years or so of about one and a half degrees centigrade

  • And that some of that heat goes into the ocean, and it causes the top of the ocean to expand.

  • And increases the sea level rise

  • We've got the two factors going on together and it's climate change.  

  • It's not just the U.K.'s military bases that are threatened by rising oceans and storm surges.

  • In the U.S., the Pentagon predicts there will be a 6-foot rise in global average sea levels.

  • The Pentagon has recently reported that

  • 79 nuclear military bases will be affected by rising sea levels and frequent flooding.

  • This has played out in real-time when the nerve center of the U.S. nuclear deterrent

  • was submerged by floodwater, with recovery of the base to cost over $1 billion.

  • What's the current nuclear threat level?

  • I think there's there's a feeling that we're

  • entering into a more dangerous period in our nuclear history.

  • Russia remains whether it's said officially or not one of the main reasons for that deterrent

  • capability in the United Kingdom.

  • What's the current feeling around

  • the nuclear deterrent and nuclear weapons?

  • My gut instinct would say the British public or the U.K. public, probably split fairly evenly

  • between whether it's a good idea to retain nuclear weapons and the particular system that we have.

  • Britain is different to other countries,

  • where there is very little open debate about nuclear weapons.

  • There's virtually nothing in France, in Russia, China, some extent in the United States.

  • That leads on to something like

  • changing the infrastructure is going to be a political hot potato.

  • Yeah, I mean, it makes it something that is already

  • problematic because of the costs, even more so.

  • This would be another significant cost that would

  • have to be borne presumably by the Ministry of Defence,

  • at a time where there are big demands on lots of other conventional warfighting capabilities.

  • This is a prime ministerial decision that would have to involve

  • a number of other departments as well.

  • It would not be an easy thing to do.

  • And I think that's probably one of the reasons why this problem has not been given a lot of attention

  • because there's not a very easy one to solve.

  • There was a proposal for a very substantial

  • investment in the infrastructure on-site a few years ago.

  • So the likelihood of money being found to invest in either upgrading the existing infrastructure to

  • keep floods out or to replace it with higher grade infrastructure, that's very likely to be found.

  • We tend to think about the risk is happening tomorrow.

  • And really, what we're talking about is a progressive trend.

  • That may be going up until 2100.

  • So the infrastructure improvement doesn't happen have to happen now.

  • All of it, some of it will.

  • But some of it can be planned to be progressively built in over 20, 30, 50 years even.

  • It doesn't mean it's cheap, it doesn't mean that it's not technically challenging

  • but it is something that's much more manageable.

  • But do you think really this comes down to cost?

  • I think it's reasonably clear that cost is a huge driver.

  • The institute of mechanical engineers some time ago,

  • said that U.K. nuclear installations will be subject to either defense or abandonment.

  • So this isn't really a particularly new phenomenon.

  • So yes, cost is significant.

  • It is a complex debate.

  • But it's one that we need to face openly and with clear information.

  • And soon.

This is Faslane.

字幕與單字

單字即點即查 點擊單字可以查詢單字解釋

B1 中級

The home of Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons is at risk — and climate change is to blame

  • 8 0
    Summer 發佈於 2021 年 11 月 19 日
影片單字