Llangefni Nuclear Jamboree leaves many unanswered questions

A public relations exercise was held by Rolls Royce and Great British Energy –
Nuclear in Llangefni on 22 October in order to attract companies to make
applications for a place in the supply chain for the possible Rolls Royce
project on the Wylfa site.

People Against Wylfa-B ( PAWB) would like to answer some points raised
there. Iolo James from Rolls Royce claimed that nuclear power is clean.
Totally wrong and deliberately misleading. Mining uranium in Australia,
Canada, Khazakstan (41% of the world’s uranium), Niger, Namibia, Russia
and Ukraine has a very poisonous footprint. Lands of native people have
been radioactively polluted by mining for uranium, and the health of miners
and people living in neighbouring communities has been impacted by cancers.

The cycle of mining, milling, preparing and enriching the raw uranium for
nuclear reactors is also very carbon fuel intensive. There is nobody
happier to see new nuclear power stations being approved than the giants of
the fossil fuels industry. They know there will be extensive use of fossil
fuels in the prolonged process of building new nuclear reactors for up to
twenty years. Therefore, building any new nuclear power stations will
contribute greatly towards increasing carbon emissions and worsen climate
change problems.

The never-ending process of trying to stop radioactive
wastes escaping to the atmosphere is extremely dirty and expensive. The
nuclear waste stores at Sellafield are very old and radioactive releases
from there have made the Irish Sea the most radioactively polluted sea in
the world.

No radioactive waste will be able to be moved from Hinkley Point
C if the project is completed, and it would be the same story for Sizewell
and Wylfa if reactors were built there. This waste will be twice as hot and
radioactive as waste from the British State’s older reactors.

Is Mr James
happy to see a beautiful coastal area of Ynys Môn being turned into a
graveyard for poisonous and long-lived nuclear wastes that will be
impossible to move from the site for at least 150 years.

Nuclear power is
not clean. Llinos Medi MP emphasised that Rolls Royce will have to be a
good neighbour to the local community if they proceed with building three
larger 470MW reactors on the Wylfa site. That would mean 50% more in
electricity output than the two old 475MW Magnox reactors at Wylfa. Rolls
Royce has appointed the surveying company, Fisher German to join their
project. This is the same company who were operating with Horizon on their
Wylfa project. This was the company who tried to force Richard and Gwenda
Jones from Caerdegog farm into selling a chunk of their land to facilitate
the building of Horizon’s nuclear monster. Hardly an example of being a
good neighbour!

Having to store poisonous radioactive waste on the site for
very many years has already been mentioned. Nobody should have to tolerate
the threat of the presence of radioactive waste stored at the Wylfa site.

That is a great threat to the viability of the agricultural and tourism
industries locally and a real threat to human and environmental health if
radioactivity escaped from a waste store or from a serious accident in a
reactor. A December 2025 Harvard T.H Chan study found a statistical link
between those living close to nuclear power plants and higher cancer rates
in Massachusetts. The strongest link was seen within 20 to 30 kilometers of
a nuclear station, and the risk increased as people got older. There is
also a risk to workers.

Nuclear power stations are not good neighbours.
Politicians should not be overly optimistic about the Rolls Royce plan.
Although £2.6 billion has been promised to Rolls Royce by the Westminster
government, that is only a first step. Remember that Hitachi spent over £2
billion up to submitting a full planning application for the two reactors
at Wylfa, but they withdrew because they were not prepared to spend huge
sums of company money to deliver the plan. That can also easily happen to
Rolls Royce if the government will not be willing to plough additional
billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to deliver the plan.

It would mean
ordinary people paying up front in taxes and even higher electricity bills
to facilitate building new nuclear reactors, and the people of Ynys Môn
having to live alongside an extremely dangerous, dirty and expensive
technology that threatens environmental and human health.

PAWB 27th Oct 2026, https://www.stop-wylfa.org/