Dr John Large
British nuclear scientist who oversaw the lifting of the Russian Kursk submarine from the seabed
DR JOHN LARGE, who has died aged 75, was a British independent nuclear scientist who was called in to lead a nuclear safety committee consulting on the raising of the Kursk, the Russian nuclear submarine which went down in the Barents Sea on August 12 2000 with the loss of all 118 officers and crew.
Large was awarded a medal by the Russians for helping to raise the submarine. In Britain, however, his criticism of the government over its nuclear waste policy led some elements of Whitehall to regard him as an infernal nuisance.
Following the sinking of the Kursk, Russia initially refused all help from foreign experts, and four days after the accident the Russian Navy’s Commander-in-chief stated that it had been caused by a collision with a Nato submarine – a story which continued to do the rounds for more than two years after the disaster.
Eventually, however, the Russians accepted that they needed foreign help to salvage the vessel, which, in addition to the bodies of its crew, contained several torpedoes, two 220 megawatt nuclear reactors and 22 nuclear-capable cruise missiles.
In April 2001 the Dutch salvage consortium, Smit and Mammoet, was awarded the contract and, for insurance purposes, insisted that a nuclear coordinating group of four consultants under Large be appointed to advise on radioactive safety. “The Russians were very open with me,” Large said, “but then they had to be.”
From on-site research, evidence passed to him by the Russians and conversations with the vice commander of the Russian Northern Fleet, Large soon ruled out the collision theory. The disaster, he concluded, occurred after the testfiring of a top-secret torpedo went catastrophically wrong, and it jammed in the tube. The torpedo then exploded in a “schoolboy chemical reaction” when hydrogen peroxide, used to reduce friction around the missile’s nose, reacted with fuel propellant, turning the forward compartment into an inferno.
The panic-stricken crew then spent two desperate minutes trying to control the resulting blaze before a second devastating explosion sealed the sub’s fate. Another seven torpedoes blew up, blasting a massive hole in the pressurised hull. “When I saw the damage I could not believe it,” Large told an interviewer. “There was a hole you could drive a bus through.” His findings were supported by evidence from the British government’s seismic monitoring station at Blacknest, Berkshire.
On October 8 2001, from the salvage team’s control room in Rotterdam, Large oversaw the raising of the Kursk in a 15-hour operation from the sea bed to a giant barge for transport to a dry dock. “I am afraid this tragedy shows many things,” he said. “The first lesson is do not fire an experimental torpedo from a fully armed submarine. Another is that there are serious problems with Russian submarine design.”
However, he added, the Russians were lucky the accident occurred in relatively shallow water: “Another 200 metres and the boat would still be lying on the bottom with nuclear reactors prone to corrosion.”
In Britain, Large did consultancy work with Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, local authorities and government departments, and advised Tony Blair on nuclear matters when he was shadow energy spokesman in the 1980s. But he also took up cases on behalf of local communities against government departments – such as radiation exposure affecting former nuclear submarine workers in Chatham, Kent – and was a constant critic of official plans to deal with nuclear accidents, and the disposal of nuclear waste.
When in 2000, Tireless, a Trafalgar class nuclear submarine based at Faslane, limped into Gibraltar after radioactive coolant seeped from her reactor, Large was one of three experts called in to monitor the year-long repairs, which had sparked furious protests on the Rock and a political row between Spain and Britain.
Drawing comparisons with Kursk, he concluded that the vessel had only narrowly avoided disaster: when cracks appeared in Tireless’s reactor, officers had done everything they were told to do in the text book – but the text book was wrong. Only chance, he claimed, had avoided a disaster after officers made crucial decisions while hopelessly ill-informed.
He was due to to present a paper on the incident in March 2005 at a seminar at the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (Imeche), but was surprised in January to hear that the chief executive of the Warship Support Agency had sent a letter to the organisers warning that Large’s paper contained “factual errors” and stating that the MOD did not agree with Large’s analysis.
Thinking he might have been bugged, Large requested and obtained copies of relevant internal emails from the MOD under the Freedom of Information Act, which had come into force in January. The results were somewhat embarrassing for the MOD.
One email posed the question of how best to “stymie” Large’s report, while another suggested Large’s paper was “unsound and lacking in academic rigour”, but added: “I make this point … because hinting at poor academic pedigree is a killer for the Institutes [sic].” Another read: “Probably best to burn this email before the Freedom of Information Act kicks in.”
On the other side of the argument, one correspondent warned that the MOD had “been round the buoy previously of considering using the Official Secrets Act and other similar vehicles” to gag Large, but had drawn back, while the officer in charge of investigating Tireless wrote: “The facts he gives in the narrative about Tireless and Kursk I would not take serious issue with … his overall facts are correct.”
The seminar went ahead as planned and an MOD spokesman denied allegations of a smear campaign, claiming that the letter to the Imeche was written to ensure that a balanced account was given.
John Henry Large was born on May 4 1943 and brought up in the East End of London. His father was a Fleet Street printer, his mother a pub landlady.
After taking a degree in Engineering at Imperial College, London, Large moved to the US at the age of 21 to work on the country’s nuclear weapons programme, taking American citizenship. When he found that he was at risk of being conscripted to fight in Vietnam, however, he crossed the border to Canada and returned to Britain, where he was made a research assistant at Brunel University in 1968; he was promoted to lecturer in 1971 and remained on the staff until 1986.
At Brunel he undertook research for the UK Atomic Energy Authority, much of which remains classified, though he was believed to have been involved in the design of Britain’s fleet of advanced gas-cooled reactors and worked for a time at Windscale (now Sellafield).
In 1986 he founded Large & Associates, a consultancy specialising in problems with engineering systems, particularly in the nuclear field. He went on to give evidence to select committees, government departments and campaigning groups on all matters to do with nuclear safety – including the potential dangers involved with the storage of radioactive waste at Sellafield and the risks of terrorist attacks on UK nuclear installations.
His readiness to tell people what they did not want to hear extended to anti-nuclear activists as much as to government departments. When Greenpeace campaigners collected sand from a public beach near the Sizewell B reactor in Suffolk and expressed alarm over the levels of radiation they found, Large replied “That’s nothing,” and pulled out some pieces of rock he had in his pocket. The Geiger counter went off the scale, but his point was made: there are safe levels of radiation.
Large is survived by his wife Jenny, an artist, and a daughter from an earlier relationship.
John Large, born May 4 1943, died November 2 2018