nuclear-news

  Welcome to Britain’s biggest building site. There’s a ‘fishdisco’

 It’s economy v ecology at Hinkley Point C power station, which
will power a fifth of British homes if it can pull off an audacious plan to
protect wildlife.

Two miles off the Somerset coast, a strange sound is
playing. About 20 metres below the slate-grey surface of the Bristol
Channel, a small device called a ceramic transducer blasts out a
high-pitched acoustic beam at a frequency far higher than can be detected
by the human ear. This machine — once disparaged by the former
environment secretary Michael Gove as a “fish disco” — is being
tested to see if it can scare off the salmon, herring, shad, eel and sea
trout that in six years’ time will start being sucked in their millions
into massive water inlets that have been built near by.

Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is late and over budget. This is the biggest building
site in Britain, possibly Europe: 12,000 staff and 52 cranes (including the
world’s tallest — “Big Carl”, 250 metres high) are working to
complete the project. When the £46 billion station finally switches on in
2031, it will power more than a fifth of the UK’s homes.

To cool the reactors, 120,000 litres of seawater a second — fish and all — will be
sucked into concrete pipes six metres wide. A complex mechanism has been
installed to return as many fish as possible to the sea, but even so,
Hinkley’s owner, EDF, estimates that up to 44 tonnes of marine life —
more than 180 million individual fish — will be killed each year.

Natural England, in consultation with the Environment Agency and Natural Resources
Wales, will advise EDF whether the fish disco machine is sufficient to
comply with its planning permission, or whether the company will need to
revert to its plans for creating salt marshes like the one at Steart.

David Slater, Natural England’s regional director for the southwest, said the
agency is keeping an open mind on the fish deterrents. But if the tests
fail to demonstrate the fish can be kept away, the energy company will be
required to return to its plan for “compensatory habit” — the jargon
for the salt-marsh reserves — as a condition of its planning permission.

 Times 18th May 2025, https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/welcome-to-britains-biggest-building-site-theres-a-fish-disco-c0wqs8lg9

May 22, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, UK