Press Release – no embargo
20th October 2022
We have been warned over and over again that the effects of climate change represent an existential threat – a mortal peril – to humanity and to the planet’s life support systems. Successive governments have done little more than announce targets: the complete elimination of carbon from the energy sector by 2035 and the same target for the entire economy by 2050. Yet the housing stock largely remains uninsulated, calls for retrospective thermal upgrading to be fitted unheeded, the transport sector behind schedule for total electrification, subsidies for renewable electricity generation withdrawn while criticism mounts about the accuracy of the UK’s carbon account. The Drax power station in Yorkshire alone is thought to produce a million tonnes of carbon a year which does not feature on that account as it is considered to be ‘off set’ by the planting of saplings. The UK is paying lip-service to climate change and the current generation of young people setting out on their life’s journey have every right to adopt extreme campaigning tactics as they watch their future crash and burn in extreme weather events, drought, famine, social unrest and societal breakdown.
Climate change impacts are evident closer to home in Suffolk. Warnings about the collapse of cliffs all along the Suffolk heritage coast are not made lightly and nor are they without justification, as the attached photos of the coast at Thorpeness and the demolition of The Red House, just 2 miles from Sizewell, attest. The Suffolk coast is eroding at a pace which should rule it out as an area for any sort of development: to identify it as a site for the construction of EDF Sizewell C’s twin EPR nuclear reactors is nothing short of irresponsible and reckless.
Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) calls on East Suffolk Council to withdraw its support for Sizewell C, for the Office of Nuclear Regulation (ONR) to acknowledge the fragility of the condition of the Sizewell coast by publicly withdrawing its presumption of granting a site licence for Sizewell C, for the Environment Agency to refuse environmental contamination permits for Sizewell C on the grounds that the agency is unaware of the health impact discharges will have on the environment and public health, and on the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to drop its plans for Hinkley Point C and for Sizewell C and the fantasy nuclear programme they inherited from the departing Boris Johnson.
Pete Wilkinson, TASC Chairman, said today, ‘We call for a ‘U’ turn that will not only be seen as a sensible move supported widely in the UK, but one which will remove from the government and the over-burdened British bill paying public the financial burden of paying for the building, operating and decommissioning of the Sizewell C white elephant. Such a decision would immediately liberate the £700 million public money promised by the pre-Truss administration which EDF and the French government are desperate to pocket.
‘If we don’t divert now the billions earmarked for nuclear development into energy efficiencies, swiftly-deployed and cheaper renewables, decentralisation of generation and the development of electricity storage, we will lock in disastrous climate change impacts which will have tomorrow’s youngsters wondering what sort of generation made such evidently stupid decisions as the sea laps around an inundated Sizewell site still storing thousands of tonnes of lethal spent nuclear fuel.’
2016 Thorpeness cliff behind The Red House and its garden buildings with sea defences still partially covered with vegetation
October 2022 after the loss of the garden buildings and sea defences
The Red House, Thorpeness ready for demolition October 2022
