nuclear-news

New Hinkley nuclear power plant expected to kill 46 tonnes of fish a year.

EDF building £50m nature reserve near Hinkley Point to compensate for loss of life

Jonathan Leake, 16 April 2024

A nature reserve is to be flooded by the developer of the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant at a cost of £50m to compensate for the death of fish in its cooling pipes…

 An 840 acre swathe of land along the Parrett
estuary in Somerset will be transformed into salt marsh as a habitat for
marine life to replace fish sucked in by the new power station’s cooling
ducts. The area affected – part of the Somerset levels, where Saxon king
Alfred the Great is said to have hidden from the Vikings – includes
farmers’ fields used for grazing, as well as a nature reserve.

EDF, the French company building Hinkley Point, will create a new nature reserve
nearby to replace the land being lost. The overall changes are expected to
cost it £50m. The massive water intakes used to suck water from the
Bristol Channel to cool Hinkley Point C’s reactors are expected to kill
up to 46 tonnes of fish a year when the plant opens in 2031.

EDF also explored installing an acoustic fish deterrent, effectively a loud noise to
ward away animals, but concluded this would cause more harm than it
prevented. Chris Fayers, the company’s head of environment at Hinkley,
said: “An acoustic fish deterrent would use 280 speakers to make noise
louder than a jumbo jet 24-hours a day for 60 years with unknown impacts on
other species like porpoises, seals, whales. “It offers a very
small potential benefit to protected fish species and would also risk the
safety of divers in the fast-flowing tides of the Bristol Channel. New
natural habitat is a better solution.”

EDF said it was working with
Natural England, the Environment Agency, and other conservation
bodies to develop the new natural habitats. It plans to take out
compulsory purchase orders to acquire the land and then destroy its
protective dykes so that saltwater can flood in, according to planning
documents.

Dozens of farmers around Pawlett Hams, north of Bridgwater in
Somerset, have been told their grazing land is likely to become salt marsh.
One said: “It’s an existential threat to farmers’ livelihoods.” EDF
has told local people: “We are proposing to create 340 hectares of salt
marsh habitat. Will Barnard, chair of the Pawlett Parish Council, who also
works as an environmental land manager on some of the affected land, said
no-one was happy with the scheme.

 Telegraph 16th April 2024

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/04/16/hinkley-point-developer-flood-nature-reserve-fish-deaths

April 18, 2024 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, UK