Dawn blockade leaves nuclear workers locked out — Hinkley blockaded today

Via South West Against Nuclear

23/11/12

Dawn block­ade leaves nuclear work­ers locked out

At 6am this morn­ing 10 pro­tes­tors block­ad­ed access to EDF ener­gy’s nuclear sites at Hink­ley Point, pre­vent­ing the morn­ing shift from start­ing work. 4 peo­ple in arm locks formed a bar­ri­er across the main access road at Wick Moor Drove in a bid to pre­vent fur­ther ground clear­ance work at the planned Hink­ley C site and to protest at EDF’s plan to extend the life of aging reac­tors at the Hink­ley B sta­tion.

 

Sit­ting beneath a ban­ner say­ing “Nuclear Pow­er — not worth the risk” Bris­tol tree-sur­geon Zoe Smith said, “We want the destruc­tion of land at the pro­posed Hink­ley C site to stop. EDF still don’t have plan­ning per­mis­sion for the new nuclear plant, the gov­ern­ments ener­gy pol­i­cy is in tat­ters. With Cen­tri­ca pulling out and the long await­ed Elec­tric­i­ty Reform Act delayed, there is not even enough invest­ment to fin­ish the project. If the tories fix the elec­tric­i­ty price for nuclear so that the project can go ahead it will leave a radioac­tive waste dump here for hun­dreds of years.” The ear­ly morn­ing block­ade caused long tail­backs for scores of work­ers con­tract­ed in to per­form main­te­nance work on the the exist­ing reac­tors at Hink­ley B, EDF have sig­nalled their inten­tion to re-licence the reac­tor again in 2016.

Bridg­wa­ter mum Nik­ki Clark from South West Against Nuclear said, “Not only do we not need new nuclear, we cer­tain­ly don’t need to extend the life of the exist­ing reac­tors even fur­ther. Just this year alone reac­tor no 4 in the B sta­tion has scrammed at least three times. EDF like to call these emer­gency shut­downs ‘unplanned out­ages’ but this delib­er­ate­ly con­ceals the fact that these age­ing reac­tors are now in a dan­ger­ous con­di­tion. In 2008 the reg­u­la­tors threat­ened British Ener­gy with clo­sure of the site. The reac­tors do not have any few­er cracks in the graphite core now than they did then. Do we have to have our own Fukushima­here in Som­er­set­be­fore we aban­don this insan­i­ty and embrace a renew­ables rev­o­lu­tion in the UK?”

Stop Hink­ley spokesper­son Theo Simon said, “We sup­port this protest. New nuclear is dead in the water. We need pub­lic invest­ment in a renew­ables rev­o­lu­tion which could cre­ate a mil­lion cli­mate jobs and cut ener­gy bills through a pro­gramme of home insu­la­tion and ener­gy-effi­cien­cy. With it’s mas­sive marine ener­gy resource, West Som­er­setis per­fect­ly placed to lead the way in renew­ables, but EDF’s plans would turn it into a tox­ic waste dump for our grand­chil­dren.”

Via South West Against Nuclear
Pro­tes­tors are block­ing the road out­side Hink­ley Point TODAY
Fri­day, 23 Novem­ber, 2012, 7:52

Pro­tes­tors are block­ing the road out­side Hink­ley Point TODAY stop­ping the work­ers enter­ing the site. Lis­ten to BBC Som­er­set report 7.40am. Pass on the word those who want to take a flask of cof­fee to them, great­ly received.

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/radio/bbc_radio_somerset_sound/listenlive