Memorandum submitted by the Stop Hinkley
Coordinator
On 19 November a three day event occurred near
Bridgwater in Somerset organised by DECC to give local people
a say in the consultation on the National Policy Statement. In
principle this should have been a good idea: two days to have
a look at an exhibition and a Saturday morning session to hold
a public meeting and hear peoples' views.
Unfortunately the event was a missed opportunity.
The chosen venue was nearly two miles on the wrong side of Bridgwater
from the communities most likely to be interested. It was held
in a relatively unknown location near a motorway turn-off.
Most people who might have attended the event
live in villages in West Somerset nearer the power station or
Burnham-on-Sea where health concerns are a sensitive issue. Public
transport is very limited in West Somerset and people from much
of West Somerset would have needed to change buses once or even
twice to get near the venue.
On the DECC website notices, no information
was given on how to access the site by public transport: simply
a link to the venue's website, which itself gave no specific directions
even for drivers.
One colleague from Stop Hinkley bicycled from
Bridgwater to the location on the opening day and could not find
it, for some time cycling around. A very small notice had been
pinned outside the building but there were no signs from the main
road. Another colleague went by car and drove round in circles
before eventually discovering it.
It seems odd that a Government Department responsible
for mitigating the effects of Climate Change should choose a venue
that forces people into their cars when plenty of venues are available
in Bridgwater town centre, accessible by foot for many and public
transport for others.
I raised the inadequacy of the venue location
at a meeting of NGOs with DECC officials a few days earlier on
17 December, offering to help find a suitable location if they
needed.
My colleague who went along on the opening day
of the exhibition found the hall empty apart from numerous DECC
officials who seemed to compete with each other to talk with him.
During the three hours he stayed, explaining in detail his objections
to nuclear power, only one other member of the public was registered.
This was Simon Dunford, the EdF Project Manager for Hinkley Point
C! (Meanwhile outside the policeman allocated to marshall the
crowds had no bigger a job than to guard my friend's bicycle!)
This leads on to another weakness in the planning
for the event. Any publicity about the event had been so insignificant
that it seemed to have passed most people by. At the 17 November
DECC/NGO meeting, we were told that the event could not have been
announced before the National Policy Statement, which came out
just two weeks prior to the DECC Hinkley event. In that case the
meeting should have been set for a later date.
I think there was too little notice and too
little publicity given to the important event. Overall it gave
the impression that DECC did not really want to engage in local
discussions.
The public meeting on the Saturday was reasonably
well structured with short presentations and time for questions
and debate but not well attended with about twenty to twenty five
participants. The mood of the meeting was very much opposed to
the project, with one exception, the chair of the Hinkley Site
Stakeholders' Group who was more neutral in his comments.
Last week DECC issued a notice by email saying
they were holding another new event on 27 January, but for just
for two hours in Stogursey. I'm reluctant to say that meeting
in this small village, although suitable for residents in that
particular village is still not great for most West Somerset inhabitants.
Stogursey is right under Hinkley Point and so
it is appropriate for those people to air their opinion about
the new 500 acre site, its associated infrastructure and the national
policy which will affect them a good deal. But again it is not
a central position for a public event affecting villages and towns
at least from Minehead to Burnham-on-Sea. It is a long way off
the A38 which runs parallel to the coast but five or six miles
inland with clusters of bigger towns dotted along it.
Colleagues in Bristol, which is just 35 miles
from Hinkley Point and 12 miles from Oldbury nuclear power station,
have complained that no consultation events have been planned
for the city. People from Bristol were actively involved in the
previous Hinkley C Public Inquiry in 1988-89 and many feel left
out of proceedings geared to just very local communities.
Other large towns where a meeting would be appropriate
include Taunton (the county town), Minhead, Weston-super-Mare,
Burnham-on-Sea (where excess breast cancer and infant mortality
has been recorded) and Glastonbury.
Bristol City council are due to debate a motion
objecting to the building of Hinkley Point C on 19th January and
calling for the Government to provide a public event to debate
the issue.
I haven't had feedback from all local sites
but I gather people in Hartlepool were furious to have a meeting
thrust on them with just three days' notice.
Responses from DECC officials at the Hinkley
public meeting were also a concern. One person asked what would
happen if uranium supplies were to run out due to the number of
new nuclear plants being planned or constructed world-wide. He
was told by a DECC official that market forces would come into
play and that higher prices for uranium would enable a market
economy to go to greater expense in extracting uranium from lower
grade ore or even from the sea. He said this had been the case
in the seventies when oil prices had gone up, enabling oil companies
to exploit more difficult oil-fields.
The disturbing thing about this logic is that
the carbon cost of this more difficult extraction was not even
referred to by the official who had worked for Shell before coming
to DECC. Uranium extraction from low grade ores requires extensive
use of fossil fuels. Indeed the open-cast uranium mine in central
Australia contributes ten percent to their national carbon emissions.
It is also, incidentally the largest man-made hole on earth.
I think people employed in key positions of
the UK department responsible for mitigating Climate Change should
have an altogether different mind-set, which should be generally
helpful to the climate issue. This point applies equally to the
more parochial question described earlier of of locating venues
which reduce the need for travelling or at least allow access
by public transport.
THE REMIT
OF THE
INFRASTRUCTURE PLANNING
COMMISSION
We have a particular concern that the IPC has
been set a remit in the National Policy Statement which excludes
examining the question of on-site spent fuel storage. The European
Pressurised Reactor (EPR) favoured by Electicite de France for
Hinkley Point, as well as the Westinghouse AP1000 under consideration
for other sites such as nearby Oldbury, will "burn"
the uranium fuel in an especially intensive way. This "high
burn up fuel" has specific handling problems when it is removed
from the reactor in that it is so hot and so radioactive that
it will be required to be stored under water in mechanically cooled
ponds for one hundred years before it can be handled for preparation
for eventual "disposal". (We use quotation marks here
as we do not believe that nuclear waste can be disposed of in
the usual meaning of the word due to its toxic longevity). With
the expected sixty year operating life of the EPR this would mean
the nuclear fuel will be at Hinkley, for example, for at least
one hundred and sixty years.
There are complex problems associated with having
a spent-fuel storage plant on a site such as Hinkley Point:
— The fuel canisters are more likely to
splinter or corrode due to heat and radiation, producing a potential
local contamination issue.
— The plant would be a potential terrorist
target extending long after the nuclear power station itself has
closed down.
— Because the power station would have
ceased generation there would be no more income stream for the
company, in this case EdF, rendering removal or even safe monitoring
of the dangerous spent fuel less certain.
— So Somerset and other counties with a
new reactor may be left with a de facto nuclear dump.
The local community should be in a position to raise
their concerns and objections to this eventuality so the IPC should
be allowed to make a judgement on the question.
We are aware that the Conservatives have suggested
they may make changes to the IPC terms of reference should they
take power after the forthcoming election. Whoever holds office,
we would like to see a more openly democratic process. This should
include:
— Ministerial accountability and the eventual
decision on nuclear power stations resting with the Secretary
of State.
— Hearings for all members of the public
who wish to make a statement.
— Hearings to be held near the relevant
site but also at nearby big towns and cities (The 1988-98 Hinkley
C inquiry held sessions in Cardiff but still finished in 14 months—not
as long as the Government has suggested that public inquiries
on major projects take).
— The ability to cross examine experts
from Government, the nuclear industry and put forward our own
expert witnesses and legal representatives.
LOCAL ISSUES
RELATED TO
THE NUCLEAR
NATIONAL POWER
STATEMENT
As mentioned earlier, health issues are a vital
concern to many who live downwind from Hinkley Point and our group
has commissioned several epidemiological studies showing excess
breast cancer and infant deaths in the area. The local health
authority pointed to Hinkley as a likely link to a 24 percent
excess of leukaemia in young people in West Somerset in a seventeen
year study in 1988. This paper has never been challenged.
The EN-6 DECC document allots extra space dealing
with the health subject in the Hinkley Point section. We assume
this is some measure of sensitivity to local feelings on the issue.
But the section skims over the local debate on health issues which
includes questions over the South West Public Health Observatory's
use of different wards to supposedly `replicate' Professor Busby's
2008 study showing a threefold excess of infant mortality in coastal
wards downwind from Hinkley. The SWPHO said there was no significant
infant mortality excess having, we feel, diluted the statistics
by included some wards which were less likely to be affected.
We will bring up these arguments in our submission
to the DECC consultation but want to say here, as a process comment,
that it would be helpful to see the results of a forthcoming study
by the Committee on Medical Aspects of Radiation in the Environment
(COMARE) into the very large German Government KiKK study into
childhood leukaemia near nuclear power stations.
This important study showed a doubling of leukaemia
within five kilometres of all reactor sites. COMARE expects its
report to be ready in the spring but respondents will not have
a chance to scrutinise it before the end of the DECC consultation,
particularly the `Justification' process which will decide on
the ramifications of new nuclear build on health effects.
On that point we believe that the current Secretary
of State, having already made his views known about new nuclear
power, cannot be seen as an arbiter and decision-maker on the
Justification question. The call for a public inquiry has been
turned down but we believe this decision should be reviewed.
SUMMARY
In summary I would say we are not convinced
about the authenticity of the DECC consultation as viewed from
a local perspective. Decisions seem to have been made which reduce
the options for local public involvement in the bigger questions
around building more nuclear power stations and bias the outcome
in a particular direction. DECC officials appear to have the promotion
of nuclear power higher up their agenda than either consulting
local people or mitigating climate change.
January 2010
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