Shocking
stories
1. Unsafe
The
Health and
Safety Executive has said that the Government's proposed new nuclear
power stations have design faults which would affect their safety. The
H.S.E. will not allow them to be built unless their structure and
safety systems are changed. This is a major blow to the plans for
nuclear power generation using designs from French companies Areva and
EdF and U.S. firm Westinghouse.
2. Dumping nuclear waste
The
new
government
is
determined to go ahead with a new generation of
nuclear power stations, even though the dangerous nuclear waste from
the old nuclear generators is still being stored in dumps around the
country. They claim that only nuclear power generation can solve the
energy shortages in the near future. It is certainly true in theory
that this would produce less greenhouse gases than using oil or
coal to produce electricity.
They are
reported to be
getting ready to allow nuclear power companies take short-cuts to
reduce
the astronomical cost - £73,000,000,000 - of taking old
generators out of use.
The Goverment
is also going to speed up the planning
process, which would mean that a nuclear power station could get
planning approval in weeks or months - not years. Three new nuclear
installations are planned for the north-west. Obviously local people
are going to be sidelined.
Gordon Brown
(remember him ?) believes that the
world needs 1,000
extra nuclear power stations. And he wants to increase nuclear power
generation in Britain to 35% or 40%. At the moment the U.K. gets 13% of
its power from nuclear sources.
Large amounts
of nuclear waste are already stored on
our doorstep, at Sellafield
in Cumbria and Springfields
near Preston.
Several
companies are on the look-out for sites
which could be used for highly-profitable contracts to store
low-radiation waste.
Two local
councils in Cumbria are said to be
interested in allowing a high-radiation dump deep underground to get
the Government off the hook but this could be far into the future. Of
course high-level waste remains dangerous for hundreds or thousands of
years.
Sellafield was
fined £2,000,000 in 2006 after
80,000 tonnes of acid contaminated with 20 tonnes of uranium and 160 kg
of plutonium escaped from a broken pipe. The leak continued for 8
months before it was detected. The plant has a long history of
accidents.
Which is the
lesser of the two evils : more
greenhouse gases, which cause climate change, or more nuclear
generation of electricity, which can never be free of serious risks of
radioactive accidents ?
3. £470,000,000
nuclear plant is a
write-off
Ten years ago a plant
to process 'mixed oxide' (MoX) was built to manufacture new fuel
from recycled plutonium and uranium. It has broken down repeatedly and
has produced only 2.6 tonnes of fuel a year; it was intended to produce
120 tonnes a year.
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have both tried
in the courts to get the plant closed down. The Irish government also
tried and failed to stop the plant from pouring radioactive poisons
into the sea.
It now looks likely that the Sellafield MoX Plant
will be closed.
4. Nuclear safety committee
scrapped
The last government quietly scrapped the Nuclear
Safety Advisory Committee after it warned that Britain's decaying
nuclear plants suffer from poor performance, delays and budget cuts in
decommissioning. The suspicion is that the committee was seen as a
nuisance which could could hold up the government's plans for more
nuclear power plants. The committee also warned that the plans for
dealing with the radioactive waste from Sellafield have slipped and
hazards have not been seriously tackled.
There have been 1,750 leaks, breakdowns or other
'events' in British nuclear power stations over the past seven years.
Inspectors said that about half could have had serious effects on
safety.
After the catastrophic accident at Chernobyl in
Ukraine 23 years ago, 190,000 sheep and 370 farms in Britain are still
contaminated from the radioactive fall-out.
5. Bribes or subsidies ?
You can be certain of five things when
the Government says it intends to build more nuclear power stations.
a) The final cost will always be miles higher than the promised cost.
They know that if the true cost was revealed when the power station was
planned, the voters would scream blue murder.
b) The Government will always pay billions of pounds to the
construction companies to cover cost 'over-runs'.
c) No-one will tell us what will happen to all the toxic waste produced
if and when the nuclear reactor is finally taken out of commission.
d) The power companies will always say that their electricity will be
cheap; in the end, it always turns out that when all the hidden costs
are paid, the cost will be far higher. They will exaggerate the costs
of generating power from renewable sources like wind and tidal energy.
They are masters of the art of dirty tricks.
e) They will always tell us that the newest nuclear generators are
absolutely safe.
f) The Government will tell us that 'the lights will go out' if
the eight promised nuclear reactors are not built. If they spent the
same amount of money on cutting electricity consumption through higher
efficiency, improving insulation and investing in renewable energy
generation, there would be no energy gap. Reducing consumption is far
more sensible than increasing supply.
Lord Mandelson said that Areva, EDF
Energy and other nuclear construction companies would get hand-outs
from
the tax-payer. The new government may refuse to subsidise nuclear
projects.
The previous government planned to allow Areva to
build four
reactors in the U.K. This same company is building a reactor in
Finland. They have been building it for four years and it will not
start generating electricity until 2012 at the earliest. Numerous
problems and defects have delayed the project. The
cost
has
risen
astronomically.