As government ends flawed consultation on nuclear power, anti-nuclear power activists step up resistance and blockade Sizewell nuclear power station in Suffolk, England.

Since 6.40am this morning, anti-nuclear power activists from the ‘People Power not Nuclear Power Coalition’ [1] have been blockading Sizewell power station in protest against the flawed government consultation on nuclear new build, which ends today, and the dumping of local democracy.

Sizewell is one of ten sites nominated for nuclear new build; and, together with Hinkley in Somerset, one of the two most likely sites for one of the first new nuclear reactors to be built by EDF Energy.

In preparation for new nuclear reactors, the government introduced the 2008 Planning Act [2] to limit the local planning procedure to relatively unimportant matters, and centralise siting and nuclear design decision on the national level. Today, the seriously flawed consultations end on the National Policy Statements for energy, including nuclear power, [3] designed to give the go ahead for ten new nuclear power stations in the UK.

“In order to build new nuclear power stations, government dumped local democracy”, Mell Harrison, 38 from Geldeston and a campaigns worker for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) said.

“We are blockading Sizewell today, to show that the government will not achieve its aim to fast track nuclear power. If local democracy is dumped, then nonviolent direct action will be our answer. Any new build will be met with resistance, and this blockade today is just the beginning.”

She continued:

“The government and the nuclear industry present nuclear power as low carbon energy and a necessity to combat climate change; but nuclear power is dangerous, expensive and does not deliver any significant reductions in carbon emissions. It locks us into a centralised energy system, and is part of the problem of climate change, not part of the solution.”

“Chipper”, 44, a male activist from Stop Hinkley added:

“The government and the nuclear industry approach the problem of nuclear waste with wishful thinking, as the conclusion of the National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation shows.” [4]

Andreas Speck, 45, from London, originally from Germany, added:

“Just to wish away the problem of nuclear waste is highly irresponsible. Spent nuclear fuel is highly toxic and remains radioactive for tens of thousands of years. Here at Sizewell, a new dry storage facility is planned, to store spent fuel rods for more than 100 years in casks. However, how long these last is unknown, and problems with similar casks at Gorleben in Germany after only a few years show that this is no solution. There is no final safe storage [for high level radioactive waste] in existence anywhere in the world. The responsible thing to do is to shut down all nuclear power stations immediately and stop producing yet more nuclear waste.” [5]

[1] The People Power not Nuclear Power Coalition is a non-hierarchical campaigning coalition of groups and individuals to promote and encourage visible and effective action against nuclear power in the UK and worldwide, to leave a nuclear-free, safe and healthy environment for future generations. More information at: http://stopnuclearpower.blogspot.com

[2] The Planning Act 2008 introduced a new stream-lined system for decisions on applications to build nationally significant infrastructure projects (NSIPs) in England and Wales. The new system for nationally significant infrastructure covers applications for major energy generation, railways, ports, major roads, airports and water and waste infrastructure. National policy will be set out by Ministers in a series of National Policy Statements (NPSs), thereby dumping local democracy. Fore more information, see Friends of the Earth:

Planning Act removes democratic decision making, http://www.foe.co.uk/campaigns/fair_future/news/planningbill_law_17248.html

[3] For more information, see Friends of the Earth press release from 22 January 2010: Legal warning to Government over energy policy statements, http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/press_releases/nps_22012010.html

[4] See paragraph 3.8.20, page 25 of the Draft National Policy Statement for Nuclear Power Generation (EN-6), November 2009, https://www.energynpsconsultation.decc.gov.uk/nuclear/nps/

‘Having considered this issue, the Government is satisfied that effective arrangements will exist to manage and dispose of the waste that will be produced from new nuclear power stations. As a result the IPC (Infrastructure Planning Commission) need not consider this question.’

[5] The existing storage facility for spent fuel at Sizewell will be full in 2015. In addition, a dry storage facility is to be built to create new storage capacity. In there, spent fuel rods will be stored in storage casks in a simple 110m storage hall with natural air cooling. Similar storage casks in Germany showed problems with the monitoring of pressure after only a few years (see http://www.contratom.de/news/newsanzeige.php?newsid=19588 – in German)

The clean up bill is £73bn and rising [2]. the old plants, now in private hands are not paying for this, the British tax payers are. FFS - the master plan is to sell greenfield land near old nuke plants to build new nuke plants and the cash will pay for the clean up?. BUT the cash is £73bn short of an old cost reported in 2008 where the cost rose from £12bn to £73bn.

What really annoys me is that sloppy journalism doesn’t point out these massive anomalies. The technology in new nuke has the same of clean up problem as old nuke plants, where do they hide the waste?

[1] http://url.ie/2ruf
[2] http://url.ie/2ruh

photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/tim_d/

Hardy swimmers taking dips after dark in popular outdoor bathing spots such as the Forty Foot and Killiney Bay in Dublin have been enjoying the aquatic light show in recent weeks.

The Marine Institute said the flashes were most likely a bioluminescent plankton called Noctiluca scintillans – sometimes known as Sea Ghost or Fire of Sea – and not radioactive waste from Sellafield as some swimmers had feared. via (PA)

Cumbria narrowly averted a nuclear disaster “five times worse than Chernobyl”, a county councillor has claimed.

Labour’s Wendy Kolbe, who represents Ulverston East, told councillors that a failure in the cooling system at Sellafield on April 1 could have led to a catastrophic explosion.

Her comments have been dismissed as alarmist and untrue.

She said: “For four hours radioactive storage tanks lost cooling water.

“If that had continued for eight hours it would have created a major disaster not only for Cumbria but for Europe.

“We could have been looking at devastation to our county. Something five times worse than Chernobyl.”

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BBC NI reports.

A spokesman for Sellafield Ltd said: “Sellafield isn’t a place that can just be closed down. It is about the removal of plant and equipment from the building, it is about decontaminating and knocking them down, that takes decades.

“A lot of work has been done but with a site as complex as Sellafield that will take a long time to do carefully and safely, which is the priority and can’t be compromised on.”

He said it would cost £73bn to decommission the plant over the next 112 years.

Juliette Jowit, environment editor The Observer, Sunday June 8 2008

Councils will be asked to store nuclear waste in deep underground vaults in return for government investment in jobs, road improvements and health screening, under plans to be announced this week.

Copeland council in Cumbria confirmed it was planning to put its name forward, a move seen as inevitable because most of the temporary waste is stored at the Sellafield reprocessing plant and the industry accounts for more than half of jobs in the area.

Elaine Woodburn, the council’s Labour leader, said that if a safe site was found and there was community support, it would ask the government for an ‘endowment’ for the community. ‘A repository [would] be here for thousands of years. We can’t ask for projects that will last 50 or 100 years because that would be a disservice to future generations,’ said Woodburn. ‘But the most important thing is making sure it could safely be located here.’

Last year, David Smythe, emeritus professor of geophysics at the University of Glasgow, said the area around Sellafield had ‘no suitable rocks’ for nuclear storage. However, the British Geological Survey, which will assess all suggested sites, said that latest research suggested that 40 to 60 per cent of Britain was suitable to store reactor waste, including much of the area around Sellafield.

The policy of storing radioactive residue in deep geological burial chambers and asking councils to volunteer sites was proposed by the government’s committee on radioactive waste management and backed by a public consultation. Ministers plan to publish their long-awaited white paper on nuclear waste detailing these proposals on Thursday.

Somethings happening here today
A show of strength with your boy’s brigade and,
I’m so happy and you’re so kind
You want more money – of course I don’t mind
To buy nuclear textbooks for atomic crimes

And the public gets what the public wants
But I want nothing this society’s got -
I’m going underground – the jam

THE massive nuclear complex at Sellafield is “in crisis” and holds the world’s biggest stockpile of spent nuclear fuel which has the potential to be “more dangerous” than the Chernobyl reactor, a new report claims.

And the UK is unlikely to meet its international commitments to reduce radioactive discharges into the Irish Sea because the plant is not working properly.

The report — “Voodoo Economics and the Doomed Nuclear Renaissance” commissioned by Friends of the Earth — says the deadline for closing the reprocessing facility has been abandoned and the plant will remain open until 2015.

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the report “Voodoo Economics and the Doomed Nuclear Renaissance” is here in pdf

Summary

This Friends of the Earth research paper by Paul Brown, former environment correspondent of the Guardian, exposes how badly the nuclear industry has performed over its entire 50 years of unfulfilled promises, and the already escalating bill to the taxpayer. It takes its name “Voodoo Economics” from the term coined by George Bush Snr to describe Ronald Reagan’s economic policy because it promised to lower taxes and increase revenues at the same time. This term has subsequently been used to refer to the use of economics based on contradictory ideas and gobbledegook/hocus pocus.

The economics of new nuclear power stations for the UK do not add up. It is not possible to achieve what the Government says it will do – build a new generation of nuclear stations in England without public subsidy.

New build will not be possible without large sums of taxpayers’ money being pledged, and extending the unlimited guarantees to underwrite all the debts of the existing and future nuclear industry.

Rising to four floors at the sprawling Sellafield complex on the Cumbrian coast, it is probably one of the biggest technical and economic disasters in the history of the British nuclear industry. For an industry with more than its fair share of mishaps, that is saying something.

The plant was originally meant to process 120 tonnes of MOX fuel a year, but it has yet to manage even three tonnes a year. As the Guardian reported in February, a grand total of only 5.2 tonnes have been produced in the six-year commissioning phase from 2001 to 2007.

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