SPINELESS ENVIRONMENT AGENCY ROLLS OVER FOR EDF
Hinkley Point fish stocks sacrificed: Sizewell’s fish stocks could be next
A notification from the Environment Agency distributed on the first of August, starts with an encouraging statement reminding us that it is responsible for regulating environmental protection at nuclear sites, ensuring that people and the environment are properly protected (emphasis added).
But behind the corporate speak of ‘permit variation’, the addition of ‘new limits and conditions’ and ‘discharge activity’ within the Water Activity Discharge permit for Sizewell C’s so-called sister plant at Hinkley Point C in Somerset, lies the cold, stark fact that the Environment Agency, which claims to ‘protect and improve the environment’, has removed the requirement to install an acoustic fish deterrent (AFD) at the head of its seawater intake in the Bristol Channel. In doing so the EA has condemned millions of fish and other marine creatures to their fate of impingement, injury and death adding to the many millions of fish fry, fish eggs, small fish and other marine biota that will be killed when entrained in the cooling system of the plant. Moreover this situation is due to be repeated at Sizewell, meaning that Sizewell Bay fish stocks and marine creatures will likewise face decimation should the plant ever be built.
A spokesperson for Together Against Sizewell C (TASC), said today, ‘Our spineless environmental regulator has simply rolled over to do the nuclear industry’s dirty work, directly contradicting its promise to protect and improve the environment and making itself complicit with the ceaseless attack on this country’s biodiversity. It is shocking that our young people have to witness such shameless sacrifice of millions of creatures on the altar of wildly misplaced government policy which is recognised by its own Science and Technology Committee as fantasy. When will we have a regulatory system in the UK which is capable of demonstrating enough spine to put the environment above corporate greed and the arm lock of government policy? The Environment Agency should be ashamed of itself.’
Note: further details of the impact that Sizewell C will have on the marine environment are available in TASC’s DCO submission prepared by marine ecologist, Dr Peter Henderson https://tasizewellc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/g-Ecological-Impacts140679253.pdf
