For years, the UK Ministry of Defense has been covering up leaks of radioactive water into the sea from a nuclear warhead storage facility in western Scotland, caused by aging pipes that have burst, according to documents from the Scottish environmental regulator obtained by The Guardian.

Radioactive water leaked into Loch Long, a sea bay near Glasgow in western Scotland, after aging pipes at the base where Britain’s nuclear bombs are stored repeatedly burst, due to the British navy’s failure to properly maintain a network of 1,500 water pipes, according to the newspaper.

The publication reported that the incident occurred at a military base near the Scottish village of Coulport, where nuclear warheads for four nearby Trident submarines are stored.

The publication, citing documents from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa), reported that pipes at the military base had repeatedly burst, once in 2010, twice in 2019, and twice more in 2021.

The regulator noted that roughly half of all storage equipment had expired at the time of the ruptures, allowing water contaminated with radioactive tritium, a substance used in warheads, to leak from the pipes.

For many years, both Sepa and the British Ministry of Defense attempted to conceal information about the leaks by classifying it as a matter of national security, until Scottish Information Commissioner David Hamilton recently ruled that the data must be released, allowing Scottish media outlet The Ferret and The Guardian to obtain and publish the documents.