Sizewell Nuclear Power Stations Blockaded

At 6:45am this morn­ing cam­paign­ers oppos­ing nuclear new build block­ad­ed the entrance to EDF’s Sizewell facil­i­ty in Suf­folk lim­it­ing access to the site by vis­i­tors to the site. This is the sec­ond time in three days that EDFs nuclear facil­i­ties have been tar­get­ed by activists, fol­low­ing hot on the heels of Friday’s dawn Block­ade at Hink­ley Point in Som­er­set.

EDF began their Con­sul­ta­tion on the 21 Nov, and the pub­lic have just eleven weeks (until the 6th Feb 2012) to wade through the 342 pages of con­sul­ta­tion doc­u­ments. The glossy Brochures encour­age us to play an ‘active’ role in the con­sul­ta­tion, so here we are. Said mom Nik­ki Clark, “The government’s ener­gy pol­i­cy and changes to the plan­ning sys­tem are pre-emp­tive­ly deny­ing peo­ple the oppor­tu­ni­ty to raise their legit­i­mate con­cerns about nuclear pow­er. This makes acts of civ­il dis­obe­di­ence extreme­ly impor­tant as with­out this there is no oth­er way to raise these issues.” She went on to say “If the process already under­way at Hink­ley Point in Som­er­set where I live is any­thing to go by, then the pub­lic here at Sizewell can expect a sham process which is noth­ing more than a cyn­i­cal box-tick­ing exer­cise designed to allow EDF to claim that they have ‘lis­tened’ to people’s con­cerns. The new process that the gov­ern­ment has intro­duced to ‘fast-track new nuclear’ is total­ly unde­mo­c­ra­t­ic and there­fore, ille­git­i­mate.

On Fri­day the gov­ern­ment announced that “they have reached a land­mark agree­ment on ener­gy pol­i­cy that will send a durable sig­nal to investors”1 so that they can intro­duce the Ener­gy Bill next week how­ev­er most com­men­ta­tors believe that The Elec­tric­i­ty reform Act is more about sub­si­dis­ing new nuclear that it is about sub­si­dis­ing ‘low car­bon tech­nol­o­gy, the proof (if any were need­ed) lies in the fact that the gov­ern­ments pro­pos­als as they stand will ham­string gen­uine­ly renew­able projects2.

On-shore wind would only require a strike price of around £80 per megawatt hour com­pared to the min­i­mum ‘strike’ price of around £165 per MW/h that would be need­ed to sub­sidise new nuclear build. This would not be the only ‘subsidy-that-isn’t‑a-subsidy ‘ that nuclear pow­er would require. Said Mell Har­ri­son, Edu­ca­tion Direc­tor at a local Eco-cen­tre “The biggest ‘subsidy-that-isn’t‑a-subsidy’ that this indus­try will receive will be the one that comes in the form of high­ly tox­ic radioac­tive waste lega­cy they plan to store on-site at new build facil­i­ties. The cost of these sub­si­dies will be borne by our grand­chil­dren both phys­i­cal­ly and eco­nom­i­cal­ly in around six­ty years time when EDF get to leave the waste where it is and return ‘cus­tody’ of it to our grand­chil­dren. This will be in the form of high­ly dan­ger­ous waste that will require a min­i­mum of a fur­ther hun­dred years cool­ing in-situ before any­one can even begin to think about pack­ag­ing it for any fur­ther ‘storage’3

Said local cam­paign­er Helen Swanston “Most peo­ple around here don’t realise that EDF were giv­en the go ahead recent­ly to build a dry stor­age facil­i­ty to house the back­log of 1,466 tonnes of radioac­tive waste that is accu­mu­lat­ing on site. The rea­son for this accu­mu­la­tion is because the tech­nocrats of yester-year promised that the ‘waste issue’ would be resolved ‘in the future’ mak­ing fan­tas­tic promis­es about mag­i­cal dis­pos­al facil­i­ties that would mate­ri­alise in the not too dis­tant future. These are the same emp­ty promis­es that todays tech­nocrats and politi­cians are mak­ing to us now. We are no clos­er now to any kind of inter­im stor­age facil­i­ty let alone any kind of final rest­ing place for nuclear waste.” The government’s so-called pol­i­cy of vol­un­tarism has seen only one set of local author­ites even con­sid­er ‘vol­un­teer­ing’ and even they seem to have cold feet hav­ing deferred any deci­sion to get involved until Jan­u­ary of next year.4 EDF plan to cre­ate 3500 tonnes of waste from their twin EPR reac­tors 5

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Notes to Edi­tors:

1 –DECC press release Re Ener­gy Reform Act:  http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/pn12_0146/pn12_0146.aspx

2 – Dr David Toke is Senior Lec­tur­er in Ener­gy Pol­i­cy in the Depart­ment of Polit­i­cal Sci­ence and Inter­na­tion­al Stud­ies in the Uni­ver­si­ty of Birm­ing­ham (UK). He was a key play­er in the cam­paign to estab­lish feed-in tar­iffs for small renew­able projects in the UK, the leg­is­la­tion for which was passed in 2008  http://realfeed-intariffs.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/are-tories-anti-bourgeois-left-or-just.html

3 –The Nuclear Reg­u­la­to­ry Com­mis­sion and Argoone Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry in the U.S high­light­ed the dan­gers asso­ci­at­ed with the new high burn up fuel in 2008 in a con­fer­ence where ‘They say that fuels with a burn-up above 45 GWd/tU cause pre­vi­ous­ly unfore­seen safe­ty prob­lems’  http://www.robedwards.com/2008/04/nuclear-super‑f.html

4 – There is deep unease about trust­ing gov­ern­ment enough to comitt to the process to find loca­tion for a nuclear waste dump with con­cerns about the abs­cence of laws gov­ern­ing the process as well as con­cerns about the unsuit­able geol­o­gy in Cum­bria.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2012/oct/03/three-month-delay-nuclear-waste-burial-cumbria

5 – Peter Lux is a local per­son con­cerned about Sizewell  http://www.plux.co.uk/3500-tonnes-of-spent-fuel-may-be-produced-by-sizewell‑c/