KICK NUCLEAR February 2023

COASTAL EROSION & SIZEWELL

As reported in In the January edition of this newsletter, a judicial review of the government’s decision to allow the building of Sizewell C nuclear power station is to proceed at the High Court on 22nd-23rd March. This case is being brought by Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) and other groups. I also reported in the December newsletter some of the arguments for the cancelling of the project that TASC will make.

Several of the arguments that will be used in court to support TASC’s case were also mentioned in the Kick Nuclear piece. 

In a release dated 17th January, TASC Chair Pete Wilkinson enlarged on one of these arguments – that the site chosen is not a safe one, as the coast on which the station is to be built is threatened by severe soil erosion. This argument was supported with photos showing such soil erosion already right up against the site where the new power station is planned to be built. (One of these photos is shown at the head of this report.)

Pete Wilkinson argues: “The pictures, taken in front of the Sizewell C site by a local resident, demonstrate the vulnerability of the Suffolk coast to erosion and to storm surges, a devastating consequence of extreme weather patterns which are predicted to occur far more frequently in the near future, the impacts being further compounded by predicted sea level rise. The International Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] 2019 report states that by 2050 – just a decade or so after Sizewell C could become operational – ‘Extreme sea level events that are historically rare (once per century in the recent past) are projected to occur frequently (at least once per year) at many locations by 2050.’ The company intending to build Sizewell C, Electricité de France’s own documents report four storm surges of three metres or more during the last century, including one during [the East Coast Floods of] 1953 of 3.44 metres above [sea level]

“...the evidence provided by these images flies in the face of the Office of Nuclear Regulation’s [ONR] insistence that they see no impediments to issuing a nuclear site licence for Sizewell C. The ONR and other government agencies should not ignore what is staring us in the face: building a nuclear power plant in such a vulnerable location and disregarding the dire warnings of the IPCC is tantamount to a dereliction of duty and we demand that the ONR admits that it is in error and announces that Sizewell is ruled out once and for all as a site suitable for a future nuclear development. To do otherwise would reveal the regulator purely as an enabler of government ideology rather than as a responsible regulator working to protect nuclear communities.

“To proceed with Sizewell C while being fully aware that it is highly vulnerable to sea level rise, storm surges and flooding, only adds to the inter-generational burden we pass on. Deliberately doing so when alternatives to nuclear power are available, is irresponsible, immoral and borders on being criminal.”

TASC is going to write to the ONR demanding that the pictures of the coastal erosion taking place at the site and the implications of the coastal erosion for Sizewell C at Sizewell are discussed at the meeting currently being arranged between the NGOs concerned and ONR.

FISH AND HINKLEY POINT C

The same month, on January 11th, Stop Hinkley Expansion, published a diatribe against EDF, who are currently building Hinkley Point C, entitled: “EDF Plan To Kill more Fish and Mammals…”

This said, “The Environment Agency decided as a requirement to the build of Hinkley Point C that EDF’s waste cooling water intake needed an Acoustic Fish Deterrent (AFD) or it would suck in and kill too many fish.   EDF appealed against using an AFD years into the building of HPC and the Secretary of State then endorsed the Environment Agency’s requirement for EDF to use an AFD.

Now EDF are refusing to back down and are asking the Environment Agency again to remove conditions that require an AFD saying they want to add a waste stream discharge from the cooling water intake process instead...! How can it be right that EDF can side-step marine conservation when a very detailed investigation showed our marine life will be depleted without the AFD?

Surely to put measures in place so that fish and sea mammals are deterred from entering the cooling water intake is the way forward as it was originally agreed to by EDF, at the onset of HPC.

“Rivers that run into the Severn Estuary and Bristol Channel rely on there being healthy fish stocks in the sea and a safe corridor for species survival. The River Wye runs for 155 miles from its source in the Cambrian Mountains in mid Wales to the Severn, and has been voted the nation’s favourite, but is in is in ecological decline. Other rivers exiting into the Bristol Channel are The Ely, The Taff, The Rhymney, Ebbw, Usk, The Severn, The Avon and The Parrett all havie their own ecological sensitivity.

“The Environment Agency has launched another four-week consultation [from 24th January to 2nd March] into EDF’s refusal to install an AFD on the two massive cooling water intake heads, three kilometres offshore from the Hinkley Point C nuclear site. To have your say click on the below and insist that the AFD is used to protect the life of the precious contributory rivers and the Severn Estuary.”

“THE WASTE REMAINS, THE WASTE REMAINS AND KILLS.”

As an example of the awful legacy of Fukushima, 12 years on, I came across this recently:

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency estimates that it will cost taxpayers 36.1 billion yen (= £217mllion?) to rectify the shoddy storage of radioactive waste in a storage pool at the Tokai Reprocessing Plant, the nation’s first facility for reprocessing spent fuel.

Around 800 containers of transuranic radioactive waste, or were dropped into the pool from 1977 to 1991 using a wire in the now disused plant in Tokai, a village in Ibaraki Prefecture northeast of Tokyo. They emit high levels of radiation.

The 794 containers each are about 80 centimetres in diameter, 90 cm tall and weigh about 1 ton, with many lying on their sides or overturned in the pool. Some have had their shape altered by being dropped.

But the site is running out of storage space and the tanks could leak, particularly in the event of an earthquake or a typhoon. So the Japanese authorities have given the site permission to release the stored radioactive water through a pipeline to the Pacific Ocean.