Is UK’s regulator of Hinkley nuclear project ignoring the seismic risks of fracking in the area?
Drill or Drop 12th Oct 2019, Hinkley. The safety regulator for the nuclear industry has no information about the risk of earth tremors from fracking near the Hinkley Point power station, a campaign group has revealed. Frack Free Exmoor, Quantocks and Sedgemoor.
(FFEQS) has also shown that the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) has had no correspondence on the subject with either the oil and gas industry regulator, the power station operator, local exploration companies or Somerset County Council. FFEQS has described the failure to assess the risk of fracking on the nuclear station, which includes the new Hinkley Point C facility, as “a gaping hole” in the safety case.
In August 2019, fracking by Cuadrilla near Blackpool caused more than 130 earth tremors, including the UK’s largest fracking-induced seismic event, measuring 2.9ML. This tremor led to formal complaints of cracks to walls, windows and doors to about 100 properties, DrillOrDrop understands. Hinkley Point is a few miles from an area where the exploration company, South Western Energy, has indicated it is interested in drilling for hydrocarbons (DrillOrDrop report).
Opposition to fracking appears to be growing in the region.
Sedgemoor District Council voted unanimously on 9 October 2019 to be a Frack Free zone. This follows previous similar votes in Somerset West and Taunton councils.
Energy Efficiency – effective, but forgotten since UK privatisation of Energy Saving Trust and the Carbon Trust.
Business Green 10th Oct 2019, Energy Efficiency. The public needs reminding that saving energy is good for the planet, argues Andrew Warren.
British people are very confused about what they should most usefully be doing, in order to assuage any guilt they might feel about damaging the climate. A Smart Energy GB study released this week found just three in 10 people think being energy efficient would have the biggest impact on protecting the environment.
This startling finding was backed up another a survey of 2,000 people undertaken by Opinium Research. That found saving energy tends to come way down the list of possible practical response under consideration. The most popular response to the Opinium survey was to “avoid throwing away food”. This was followed by various moves to reduce plastic wastage – buying plastic-packed groceries, single-use plastic bottles, using plastic shopping bags – or simply not recycling enough.
Steven Day, co-founder of Pure Planet, which sponsored the opinion survey, commented: “It is great that the majority of people are thinking more about their impact on our environment. But it looks like they
are feeling guilty about the smaller things – not the biggest-impact
activities causing the greatest harm.”
This lack of awareness of the potential for saving energy contrasts enormously with similar surveys undertaken twenty years ago, admittedly when overall awareness of the threat of climate change was far lower. Then, the vast majority of people would always respond to questions to the threat of climate change by emphasising the need to save energy, both at home and at work.
Since 2010 there have been no publicly funded awareness campaigns supporting energy efficiency funded by central government. Their abandonment directly followed the privatisation of the two main public advice agencies, the Energy Saving Trust and the Carbon Trust.
35,454 Petitioners call for scrapping of UK’s “regulated asset base” (RAB) funding for Sizewell nuclear project
Sizewell.
TASC 11th Oct 2019, Just one major problem with the Sizewell C plans is that nuclear new build projects have been largely a financial disaster. Almost every major nuclear project in the West has been plagued by delays and cost overruns: Some delays are in the order decades. Likewise, the cost overruns are of epic proportions.
Some new-build projects have had cost overruns that run into billions. Changing the funding method for the planned Sizewell C to a
regulated asset base model would shift the risk of rising costs from EDF to consumers, and could lead to even worse project planning because the existing RAB model would offer little incentive for EDF to build on-time and on-budget. EDFs investment is safe regardless, and we wind up footing the bill no matter how incompetently EDF proceeds.
TASC 11th Oct 2019,Today, campaigners from Sizewell, Hinkley Point and Bradwell nuclear sites and consumer group SumOfUs will visit the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy to deliver a 35,454-signature petition protesting the government’s proposal to subsidise new nuclear power plants by hiking energy bills.
The petition calls on the government to scrap plans to subsidise the nuclear industry through a “regulated asset base” (RAB) funding model, under which consumers would be forced to pay a surcharge on their energy bills for new nuclear power projects such as Sizewell C in Suffolk and Bradwell B in Essex.
French nuclear company EDF rules out any interest in UK’s Wylfa nuclear plan
New Civil Engineer 10th Oct 2019, EDF Energy has ruled out taking an interest in the new Wylfa nuclear site in Wales despite claiming it is the ‘best site in the UK’ for nuclear
power. https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/edf-rules-out-wylfa-bid-despite-naming-it-best-site-in-uk-10-10-2019/
Scrutiny on Britain’s nuclear plans: small modular reactors uncompetitive
UK nuclear: a Golden Egg or Poisoned Chalice? UK nuclear power isunder
intense scrutiny as costs balloon on the controversial Hinkley Point C station in southwest England
UK energy chief advises that Hinkley Point nuclear project should be scrapped
Telegraph 28th Sept 2019 Scrap Hinkley Point: nuclear plant is expensive and out of date, says Ovo Energy chief, Britain’s next nuclear power plant should be scrapped because it is wastefully expensive and out of date, according to the boss of Ovo Energy. The industry should instead look to the future with ever-cheaper renewable energy, said Stephen Fitzpatrick, the founder and chief executive of the group that will soon be the UK’s second-biggest supplier as Ovo acquires SSE’s consumer business.
“We should just call it a day. I thought at the time the deal was struck at £92.50 per megawatt
hour (MWh), inflation-linked, that it was a bad deal for customers. Unfortunately the technology, the design it is based on, is unproven,” he said. “Looking at the cost for customers of renewables, solar, and wind, the cost just keeps coming down. The cost for nuclear keeps going up.
It strikes me that this does not represent value for money for consumers, never more so than this week when the cost went up by £2.9bn.” The Hinkley Point C reactor will cost up to £22.5bn to build as costs keep rising above initial plans.
Mr Fitzpatrick would prefer the industry to invest in restructuring the energy network to handle more renewables, including the variable supply of wind and solar. This could be handled in
part with a “smart network” using batteries to handle shifting supply and demand.
“If you think about the £39/MWh that was achieved at the last auction for offshore wind, and when Hinkley Point goes live it is going to be about £100 more per MWh some time in the late 2020s,” he said. “If we make smart decisions and focus on value for money and what is best for the end consumer, I am quite sure we can keep costs [of decarbonising thenetwork] under control.” https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2019/09/28/scrap-hinkley-point-nuclear-plant-expensive-date-says-ovo-energy/
Nuclear waste is piling up – governments need to stop dithering and take action
Nuclear waste is piling up – governments need to stop dithering and take action https://theconversation.com/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-governments-need-to-stop-dithering-and-take-action-123977 Claire Corkhill
Research Fellow in nuclear waste disposal, University of SheffieldSeptember 26, 2019 The UK government has launched a process to find a volunteer community who would be willing to host a £12 billion geological disposal facility for nuclear waste. It’s about time – the initiative comes after seven decades of successive governments putting the decision off. The situation is similar in many other countries, with dangerous nuclear material being stored unsafely because of political inaction.
In the UK, nuclear waste is currently kept in safe but high-maintenance conditions, with some canisters deteriorating, at Sellafield in Cumbria. This is costing tax payers £3 billion per year.
The new geological disposal facility is a vast underground bunker, to be buried around 500m below the Earth’s surface. It is intended to safely store approximately one Wembley Stadium’s worth of highly radioactive waste that has been generated over the past 70 years. Here, it will be isolated from the biosphere – and human populations – for the 100,000 years it will take for the radioactivity to decay to safe levels.
Radioactive waste is generated from nuclear energy, military uses and also the extensive use of isotopes in medicine. The most highly radioactive portion comes from spent nuclear fuel – the used uranium fuel from inside nuclear reactors and the materials produced through recycling of spent nuclear fuel. The latter includes fission products that are transformed to glass and plutonium (which is currently neither a resource nor a waste).
These materials contain radioactive isotopes that have half-lives (the amount of time taken for half of the radioactivity to decay) of tens to hundreds of thousands of years. This means any storage solution must be extremely long-lived. That’s a significant challenge – the oldest known man-made materials are of the order of several thousands of years old.
The principle of geological disposal of nuclear waste is to use multiple barriers, much like a set of Russian Dolls. This makes it possible to contain the waste and prevent it from meeting with groundwater which would start to dissolve it – releasing radioactive materials to the environment. Engineered barriers are intended to contain the waste until most of the radioactivity has decayed.
If the disposal vaults are dug in a good, impermeable rock (such as clay or mudstone), the geology provides a natural barrier that will isolate the waste from the biosphere. This will reduce the likelihood of human intrusion into the facility. Being several hundreds of metres below the ground, there will also be long transport pathways to delay any significant migration of radioactive materials from the waste to the biosphere until far into the future.
International issue
The UK is not the only country opting for this solution. In Finland, construction of the Onkalo facility has already begun. A licence application has even been made to start disposing of spent nuclear fuel.
But progress in other nations has stalled: in France protesters surround the disposal facility in the village of Bure, while in Sweden, the Environmental Court has rejected the construction licence for a facility near the coastal town of Forsmark, due to safety concerns over the corrosion resistance of copper canisters.
In the USA, senators are suing the Federal Government for not building a disposal facility. The lack of a disposal facility has meant that thousands of metric tonnes of spent nuclear fuel, have built up – stored temporarily in dry casks at sites across the country.
The controversy is expected to extend to the UK’s new geological disposal siting process. Recent media articles have criticised the idea that see all areas of the UK – including national parks – could be suitable to host a facility. A previous siting process, launched in 2003, failed to find a site. Although two local authorities from near the Sellafield site came forward, Cumbria County Council was able to veto the vote.
The government hopes that new communities will step forward in this second process. It has proposed an incentive package offering communities £1m per year for having discussions about hosting the facility. This will increase to £2.5m per year when geological investigations are undertaken.
But environmentalists are likely to object, as they fear a better storage facility will only lead to more nuclear power stations. And indeed, Oliver Eden, former parliamentary undersecretary for energy under Theresa May’s government between 2017-2019, highlighted the disposal facility as being “the key to the future of the UK’s new nuclear build programme … providing a safe and secure way to dispose of the waste new nuclear reactors produce.”
Whatever the outcome of the current siting process, something must be done about nuclear waste. Leaving it for our grandchildren to deal with is simply not fair. What’s more, we can’t assume that future civilisations will be able to keep it safe.
The first step on the road to a solution is to initiate a public conversation about what we should do with the world’s most dangerous materials in the long term. If you are interested, a good first step could be to watch the video above and start discussing the topic with your friends, family and local authorities.
Britain’s nuclear power future might be ended, with Hinkley Point C’s escalating costs
EDF Energy says that “challenging ground conditions” mean costs could be £2.9 billion higher, taking the total bill to £22.9 billion. This might seem only of interest to EDF shareholders, given the controversial subsidy deal for the plant means consumers are protected from cost overruns.
But the potential significance of this is much bigger – it could cast a cloud over the UK’s hopes of a new wave of nuclear power plants. Ministers want more nuclear power in the energy mix alongside renewables, to meet carbon targets and provide continuous electricity supply.
Two Japanese companies have already pulled out of plans to build new nuclear plants in the UK, leaving EDF Energy’s designs for a second one at Sizewell in Suffolk as the main option. But the government’s proposed financial model for Sizewell C is very different to the one agreed for Hinkley. Unlike that deal, the “regulated asset base” (RAB) model under consultation for future plants would see consumers paying through energy bills while power stations are still being built.
The main trade-off with the RAB deal was that loading more construction risk onto consumers should make it cheaper to raise funds and therefore cheaper electricity, says Jonathan Marshall at non-profit the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit.
But the more delays and over-runs there are, it will add to concerns that consumers will be left to pick up an ever-increasing bill, he says. “Consumer groups and others that are against the new framework are going to point to the delays at Hinkley as evidence that billpayers will be liable to pay more than planned to bring new power stations online.”……
What are the alternatives? Some nuclear proponents think small modular reactors could do the job. But the technology for commercial ones is still years off and analysis suggests they could even be more costly than conventional large ones……. https://www.newscientist.com/article/2217725-could-rising-costs-at-hinkley-point-c-end-the-uks-nuclear-ambitions/
Sizewell C nuclear plan puts iconic British nature reserve in danger
The battle of nature versus nuclear: will Sizewell C destroy Minsmere nature reserve? Sophie Atherton Telegraph 22nd Sept 2019 Almost anywhere you walk at the RSPB’s Minsmere nature reserve, you get a view of the Sizewell nuclear power stations. They are a curiously ambivalent landmark, a somewhat menacing presence on the skyline, but also lending a moody, sci-fi edge to the landscape – especially on grey days when the dome of Sizewell B seems to appear and disappear depending on the passing clouds. It’s impossible not to notice the industrial behemoths, but because Minsmere is such a carnival of wildlife, you can, to a degree, ignore them. For now.
However, French energy company EDF and partner China General Nuclear Power Corporation want to build a nuclear power station to the north of the two already there.
Almost anywhere you walk at the RSPB’s Minsmere nature reserve, you get a view of the Sizewell nuclear power stations. EDF and partner China General Nuclear Power Corporation want to build a nuclear power station to the north of the two already there. Construction is due to start in 2021 and
going on for 10 to 12 years. “The plans EDF have shared have tried to indicate that the visual impact won’t be that great because of this bank of woodland,” says Rowlands, gesturing to a line of trees beyond the water overlooked by the Island Mere bird hide. “We’re trying to ascertain what
that means in reality.
I think at Hinkley – which they are modelling this station on – it’s something like 56 cranes at the peak of the construction but what does that look like – and even if the visual is somewhat obscured,
how does the noise travel? How does that affect the wildlife if it becomes more noisy?” The RSPB feels that EDF’s plans for Sizewell C throw up as many questions as answers and is concerned about the lack of information on the environmental impact of such a huge construction project so close to sites that are internationally renowned for their wildlife importance.
As well as the power station itself, building it requires new roads (for the daily journeys of hundreds of HGV lorries), a new rail link, a double-deck car park for 1,500 vehicles and several three and four-storey accommodation blocks providing 2,400 bed spaces for workers.
That’s merely a flavour, rather than an exhaustive list, of what will happen to this Area of
Outstanding Natural Beauty – on supposedly protected land – if Sizewell C goes ahead. One of the things that makes Minsmere so remarkable is that it has such a variety of different habitats. Some nature reserves are predominantly one type of landscape, but Minsmere has everything. The fate
of its reed beds, wet grassland, scrapes and lagoons, woodland, heath, vegetated shingle and beyond that the sea, along with all the thousands of species that live there, are all inextricably interconnected.
It is like a microcosm of the whole of the UK’s ecology. If one part is damaged, the whole will be affected as creatures and plants lose the conditions and then the food they need to survive.
Nuclear power is supposed to be a part of the UK’s plans for phasing out fossil fuels and moving to sustainable, eco-friendly, renewable energy sources. But if a new power station threatens to destroy the very things we are trying to protect, we have to consider carefully where to put it.
The latest stage of the Sizewell C public consultation closes on Sept 27. Details of how to respond can be found at sizewellc.co.uk
Ever cheaper wind energy a big threat to UK’s nuclear white elephants
Times 21st Sept 2019, Alistair Osborne: Who wouldn’t prefer clean energy from Dogger than, say, Hinkley Point C: the £20 billion nuclear disaster in leafy Somerset?
The latest round of offshore wind contracts is quite a moment. For the first time, it looks like being subsidy-free. Companies have agreed to build 5.5 gigawatts of new capacity, enough to power almost seven million homes, for a guaranteed price of as little as £39.65 per megawatt hour – in 2012 prices. Compare that to the price for when the turbines start whirring in 2023-24, also in 2012 money: £48.13/MWh. In short, clean energy without any extra cost to the consumer.
In just five years, wind has blown the competition away. It was only in 2014 that Dong Energy, now Orsted, signed up to build the 1,200MW Hornsea 1 project at a strike price of £140/MWh.
By September 2017, the guaranteed price for the 1,386MW Hornsea 2 was down to £57.50. And now it’s 30 per cent cheaper again: a dizzying drop that drives home two things.
First, that Britain, blessed with a nice bit of breeze, leads the world in offshore wind: by next year it’ll have 10GW of installed capacity. Second, that the more you build, the cheaper it gets.
If only the same thing could be said for nuclear power. The strike price for Hinkley Point, in the same 2012 money, is a rapacious £92.50/MWh: a socking bribe to get France’s EDF and its Chinese partner to build the thing. It’s set to rip off consumers for 35 years. Naturally, it’s at least eight years late: now shooting for operations in 2025, not 2017. Its French prototype in Flamanville, where building costs have more than trebled to €10.9 billion, is at least ten years late. Oh, and its welding’s dodgy, too.
And nuclear’s not even green: it comes with a vast clean-up bill. True, it brings baseload energy that wind can’t yet match. But storage technology is advancing all the time.
So why’s the government persisting with last century tech that comes at a radioactive price? Yes, offshorewind might endanger a seabird that’s forgotten its specs. But, luckily, it’s a bigger threat to another species: nuclear white elephants.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/597b8770-dbdf-11e9-9cfd-b79996a387b0
Strong environmental case to scrap Bradwell B new nuclear build
Mersea Island Courier 16th Sept 2019, Native oysters at risk from new nuclear build. Graham Farley of Mersea Island Environmental Alliance (MIEA) shares why marine life in the
Blackwater Estuary will be at risk if the Bradwell B nuclear new-build goes
ahead.
CHINA General Nuclear Power Group (CGN) and EDF Energy are currently
circulating updates on the proposed Bradwell new-build nuclear project. In
their article they say that members of the public have a chance to win a
photographic competition or even submit their happy memories associated
with the original Bradwell Magnox Station!
My memories of the Bradwell Magnox station include: radioactive leaks, record fines, more leaks and attempts to cover up a catalogue of failures including the failed FED
dumping of radioactive waste in our estuary.
Unsurprisingly, there are no mentions of climate change and environmental protection in their
literature. It was assumed that with the decreasing cost of green energy,
spiralling costs of new nuclear projects and collapse of other UK proposed
nuclear builds that Bradwell would be shelved.
However, this isn’t so, as we have a copy of a Marine Licence application from July this year to
survey the estuary, which confirms that the project is still moving
forward. This document confirms the power station “will likely operate
with cooling water abstracted from the Blackwater Estuary”.
The case I’m making to stop the nuclear new build at Bradwell is environmental:
the Blackwater Estuary is one of the most important wildlife habitats in
the country, therefore safeguarding and preserving this habitat for future
generations is a priority! We must protect of the delicate ecology of the
mud flats, salt marsh and the shallow estuary with its many international
environmental protections and UK Marine Conservation Zone (MCZ) status.
Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) see Revenue Asset Base (RAB) financial model as a danger to UK’s public purse
NFLA 16th Sept 2019, The Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) publishes today its response to
the UK Government consultation on the Revenue Asset Base (RAB) financial
model being proposed to assist the funding of new nuclear reactors.
NFLA see this new model as a real risk to the public purse, providing
preferential treatment to new nuclear over renewable energy investment, is
overly complicated to implement at a time when the ‘climate emergency’
calls for more straightforward and realisable schemes like energy
efficiency and decentralised energy solutions instead.
Opposition in Suffolk to Sizewell nuclear plan, which hugely threatens wildlife
ITV 15th Sept 2019, RSPB hosts new festival in response to EDF’s plans to build nuclear reactor
at the edges of a nature reserve. A thousand people attended a festival
today organised by the RSPB in response to EDF’s plans to build a nuclear
reactor in Suffolk. Sizewell C will be built on the boundary of the
Minsmere Nature Reserve which is home to more than five and a half thousand
species of wildlife.
The RSPB manages the site and opposes the energy
giants plans. They say building the reactor so close to the nature reserve
could threaten the thousands of different species of wildlife that call
Minsmere home. EDF say that the environmental impact of the new site would
be kept to a minimum, and argue that new jobs for local people will be
provided.
Among the visitors supporting the festival today (Sunday,
September 15) was television presenter, Bill Turnbull, who lives nearby. He
said: There’s no infrastructure or communications for it here. What is
here, is Minsmere – where the RSPB have been trying really hard to get all
these birds to come back. And we are going to risk it all just simply
because it’s a convenient place to build a power station.” The public
consultation into EDF’s proposal for Sizewell C will end on September 27.
“The Guardian” co-opted by UK security services?
Getting Julian Assange The Guardian also appears to have been engaged in a campaign against the WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange, who had been a collaborator during the early WikiLeaks revelations in 2010.
It seems likely this was innuendo being fed to The Observer by an intelligence-linked individual to promote disinformation to undermine Assange.
In 2018, however, The Guardian’s attempted vilification of Assange was significantly stepped up. A new string of articles began on 18 May 2018 with one alleging Assange’s “long-standing relationship with RT”, the Russian state broadcaster. The series, which has been closely documented elsewhere, lasted for several months, consistently alleging with little or the most minimal circumstantial evidence that Assange had ties to Russia or the Kremlin.

How the UK Security Services neutralised the country’s leading liberal newspaper. https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2019-09-11-how-the-uk-security-services-neutralised-the-countrys-leading-liberal-newspaper/ By Matt Kennard and Mark Curtis• 11 September 2019, The Guardian, Britain’s leading liberal newspaper with a global reputation for independent and critical journalism, has been successfully targeted by security agencies to neutralise its adversarial reporting of the ‘security state’, according to newly released documents and evidence from former and current Guardian journalists.
The UK security services targeted The Guardian after the newspaper started publishing the contents of secret US government documents leaked by National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden in June 2013.
Snowden’s bombshell revelations continued for months and were the largest-ever leak of classified material covering the NSA and its UK equivalent, the Government Communications Headquarters. They revealed programmes of mass surveillance operated by both agencies.
According to minutes of meetings of the UK’s Defence and Security Media Advisory Committee, the revelations caused alarm in the British security services and Ministry of Defence. Continue reading
UK continues to pour tax-payers’ money into (non-existent) Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

Nuclear Energy Insider 11th Sept 2019 Rolls-Royce group wins funding as UK SMR race gathers pace. The UK SMR Consortium has received financial backing from the UK government to advance
its small modular reactor programme, as part of the Industrial Strategy
Challenge Fund.
The consortium, led by Rolls-Royce, comprises Assystem, SNC
Lavalin/Atkins, Wood, Arup, Laing O’Rourke, BAM Nuttall, Siemens,
National Nuclear Laboratory, and Nuclear AMRC. “The £18 million [US$22.3
million] government funding for phase 1 of the programme (from the ISCF
Wave 3 bid we were recommended from by government) is being matched by
industry funding in the consortium,” Ben Todd, Rolls-Royce Communications
Business Manager – Nuclear, told Nuclear Energy Insider.
“It’s a really big boost to the project, however we have a conservative outlook and
realise there remains a significant amount of work still to do and many
hurdles to overcome. Phase 2 will be a further circa £500 million [US$618
million] total (matched from government, industry and possibly equity
providers) to take through to the completion of the GDA process.”
https://analysis.nuclearenergyinsider.com/rolls-royce-group-wins-funding-uk-smr-race-gathers-pace
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