SSG meeting 17 /01/19

The Nuclear Free Local Authorities have put out a press release supporting a joint initiative with European partners to call on the European Investment Bank to end support for new nuclear projects

NFLA Steering Committee Chair Councillor David Blackburn said:
“I am pleased to co-sign this joint letter from Europe’s three leading local government organisations that call for a move away from nuclear energy in favour of renewable energy alternatives. As the climate emergency bites it is critical that the limited amount of finance available for new energy projects should be focused on renewable energy schemes. Both the EIB, and the UK Government, should urgently rethink plans to support new nuclear projects. They are not the answer to delivering a ‘net zero’ carbon Europe as quickly as can be reached in the near future. Only wholesale renewable energy generation linked to low carbon renewable transport and heating solutions are deliverable and financially practical in the short period of required rapid carbon emission cuts available to us.”

The press release can be found on their website

http://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/nfla-support-joint-initiative-call-european-investment-bank-end-support-new-nuclear/

Together Against Sizewell C

1 week ago

“EDF’s record with the same new design of nuke at Hinkley and Sizewell is atrocious: its installation at Flammanville in France is running 12 years late at more than four times the original budget. EDF is synonymous with mammoth overruns – a risk no consumer should be made to swallow”

Together Against Sizewell C

1 week ago

The small town upended by Europe's biggest construction site

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/aug/14/hinkley-negative-life-site-shadow-bridgwater

Residents in Bridgwater, Somerset, complain of rising rents, relentless traffic and an influx of testosterone

Together Against Sizewell C

1 week ago

Revealed: mental health crisis at Hinkley Point C construction site

Several workers on nuclear plant have killed themselves or attempted to, says union

Together Against Sizewell C

1 week ago

Where will 2,000,000 litres of water a day to cool Sizewell C reactor come from?

Campaigners have voiced concerns over where up to two million litres of drinking quality water will come from every day to cool the reactors of the new Sizewell C nuclear power station if it is built.

Together Against Sizewell C

2 weeks ago

Chernobyl: a 'debt to the truth'

"On the night of 27 December 1999, a storm destroyed forests across Europe but before crossing the continent, the winds hit the French coast and a hundred million litres of water broke over the sea walls and flooded the Blayais reactor. The cooling system failed, then the diesel back up system failed, and finally two of the four essential service pumps failed.
A government spokesperson admitted that they were within twelve hours of a meltdown."

https://theecologist.org/2019/aug/07/chernobyl-debt-truth

The HBO miniseries 'Chernobyl' engaged our hearts - but not our minds. We need to shift focus from the USSR to the Western nuclear lobby.

Together Against Sizewell C

2 weeks ago

Love Minsmere Festival

The RSPB are hoping to get 1000 people to attend the Festival on Sunday 15th September to send a powerful message to EDF that we all Love Minsmere and want to see it protected from the impacts of Sizewell C. Please come along if you can.

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/love-minsmere-festival-tickets-67749539697?aff=twitter

Join us for our first-ever Love Minsmere Festival to celebrate the local area of natural beauty, Minsmere and it's wildlife.

Together Against Sizewell C

2 weeks ago

Our new Business Secretary must accept the reality of falling energy demand this time around

BUSINESS GREEN website 6/8/2019
With Andrea Leadsom returning to lead energy policy as part of Boris Johnson's government, Andrew Warren wonders if energy demand myths will once more be used to push for fracking

When considering how the new Business Secretary is likely to approach the Green Economy, most commentators have limited themselves to considering Andrea Leadsom's role as Leader of the House of Commons, as a diehard Brexit campaigner, and as a recent convert to tackling the global 'climate emergency'.

Largely overlooked has been what happened during the months when she was a junior energy minister during that brief second Cameron government, between 2015 and 2016.

I now tell the cautionary tale of how, as an energy minister, Andrea Leadsom went out of her way to downplay environmental successes, whilst promoting climate despoiling activities.

One of her most revealing initiatives was when she started claiming that energy usage in Britain was on the increase - even though statistics from her own Department stated clearly that consumption had fallen each year for the past decade. Fuel usage has subsequently fallen even lower, to below what it was 50 years ago.

'An inconvenient untruth'

In July 2015, Leadsom wrote a blog, which was placed with much fanfare upon her own Department's website. It was entitled "An inconvenient truth for the anti-fracking lobby". She began by stating categorically in justification that, as a government, "we need to meet the UK's rising demand for energy".

She then went on to excoriate all those who dared to question the merits of unbridled gas fracking, not just in ecological but in economic terms. Subsequent events has proved even that thesis to be very dubious.

But it was the use of the phrase "rising demand for energy" that was - and remains - so clearly mendacious. Overall energy usage had declined from 196.8 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoe) in 1964 to 187.9 mtoe in 2014. At the same time, national Gross Domestic Product has leaped by almost 270 per cent. Even gas consumption was no higher than it had been 30 years before.
Gas sales keep going down
Since 2005, overall energy usage had already fallen by 18 per cent, according to statistics available to Leadsom from within her own Department - and published freely on the web. Just in the previous year, even while GDP grew by 2.8 per cent, overall energy sales fell by 6.6 per cent. It is a trend that keeps continuing - gas sales fell by a further 1.7 per cent between 2017 and 2018.

Prior to her election to Parliament in 2010, Leadsom worked as a banker and fund manager. A Treasury minister from 2013, she faced controversy over her personal financial arrangements using offshore tax arrangements to reduce taxation in her buy-to-let property company, and for the creation of special trusts to avoid inheritance tax.

Mrs Leadsom - whom the magazine Private Eye has long graced with the unkind soubriquet Mrs Loathsome - faced further criticism when it was revealed she had received a series of donations totaling £70,000 via an overseas holding company in the British Virgin Islands tax haven.

She also angered environmental campaigners after reports emerged detailing how when she was first appointed to the Department of Energy and Climate Change one of the first questions posed to her presumably bemused officials was, 'is climate change real?' In fairness, she was quickly convinced of the seriousness of the crisis.

Some time after her official Departmental blog appeared, that opening text I cited was discretely altered. Without explanation. The revised version now read simply: "we need to meet the UK's demand for energy".

Rising. Or falling?

Whilst the offending word "rising" had been removed, it has meant that the blog now began with a very improbable statement of what might be deemed the bleeding obvious. It would have been far more accurate had she simply replaced the word "rising" with the more accurate word "falling".

But then it would have begged the question as to why a Minister had felt it quite so necessary to make such a strong plea on her Departmental website for yet further supplies of energy, particularly from fracking.

It is an error we must all trust that Andrea Leadsom does not repeat as she assumes overall control of UK energy policy. There are some reasons to be cautiously optimistic. The UK's emission reduction record is now a source of pride for the government, even if progress is still not being made fast enough, and during the recent leadership campaign Leadsom said that if she was Prime Minister she would declare a climate emergency. In her first week in her new post she has stressed that meeting the UK's net zero goal is a top priority. We will soon see if she is serious about that goal or if dubious new rationales for expanding the UK's fossil fuel industry are offered.

Andrew Warren is a former special advisor to the House of Commons select committee on the environment

Together Against Sizewell C

3 weeks ago

“Nuclear energy is never profitable”, new study slams nuclear power business case

“Nuclear power was never designed for commercial electricity generation; it was aimed at nuclear weapons. That is why nuclear electricity has been and will continue to be uneconomical. Further, nuclear energy is by no means ‘clean.’ Its radioactivity will endanger humans and the natural world for over one million years,”

Study by leading German economic think-tank finds every 1,000MW of nuclear power plant built since 1951 resulted in an average economic loss of $A7.7 billion.