nuclear-news

Nuc­lear power plant is threat to our future.

Western Morning News, Jo Smol­don Bridg­wa­ter, Somer­set18 Dec 2025,
https://www.pressreader.com/uk/western-morning-news/20251218/281835765040539

YES, of course the Stop Hinkley event you pub­li­cised (Let­ters, Decem­ber 13) was Christ­mas humour, but it does con­cern us that sig­ni­fic­ant facts are being ignored about the out­dated Hinkley Point C new (old) nuc­lear power plant being built on our pre­cious Severn estu­ary when cli­mate change pre­dic­tions sug­gest that the Hinkley coast­line will be inund­ated and flood­ing will occur across Somer­set.

How will this be safe when HPC radio­act­ive waste will be too hot to move and will have to reside on the fra­gile coast­line for over 200 years?

It seems that there are not enough skilled work­ers to com­plete the HPC job which has had design prob­lems, des­pite sup­posedly learn­ing from the mis­takes at Olkiluoto, in Fin­land, Flam­man­ville, in France, and Taishan, in China.

The ori­ginal work­force of 8,000 has now had to increase to 15,000, and still the start-up date is up in the clouds. The costs have escal­ated from £18 bil­lion to cur­rent pre­dicted costs of £46 bil­lion and rising.

How is the coun­try going to pay for this and all the other pie in the sky so-called new nuc­lear builds that roll off the tongues of the fast turnover of politi­cians that have been involved?

So far it has taken 10 Prime Min­is­ters, start­ing with Thatcher, to par­tially build HPC. Their leg­acy is a big mis­take that nobody has the cour­age to say we shouldn’t have star­ted this, it’s a run­away train on which nobody has figured out how to apply the brakes.

HPC is fin­ished. HPC will never be needed, I believe, other than for a build­ing site train­ing pro­gramme.

Not one of those Prime Min­is­ters will be account­able for the toxic high level radio­act­ive waste that will be lurk­ing on the Severn estu­ary coast­line far into the future for our chil­dren’s chil­dren to pay for and deal with.

The level of radio­activ­ity of the waste will be in total around 80% of the radio­activ­ity level cur­rently of Sel­lafield. This fact alone will mean that Hinkley will be the Sel­lafield of the South.

Hinkley’s design is cur­rently in the news due to its inten­tion of des­troy­ing more of our pre­cious Severn estu­ary fish and mar­ine life in its massive cool­ing water intakes, which will suck in an Olympic-sized swim­ming pool of water every 20 seconds.

EDF is fal­ter­ing over its require­ment to pro­tect the fish with an acous­tic fish deterrent. Even so, this tech­no­logy may save some of the fish, but the eggs and fry will pass into the cool­ing sys­tem and be des­troyed by the heat and chem­ic­als, which will then be pumped back out into the estu­ary.

The tech­no­logy of nuc­lear power belongs to the last cen­tury and is waste­ful of energy. The steam pro­cess res­ults in two thirds of the heat energy being pumped out into the estu­ary warm­ing the sea.

Stop Hinkley con­tin­ues to hold EDF to account, and we will be watch­ing, and we will be back for the next pre­dicted fin­ish date of 2027 with our HPC Christ­mas tur­key to cook.

December 21, 2025 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | climate change, UK