Stop Hinkley took their 2017 turkey out of cold storage in preparation to cook it for this Christmas 2025 but unfortunately EDF’s promise of electricity being generated by HPC this Christmas has failed. The generation date had moved from 2017 to 2025 and has been moved again. ‘Where is the lecce to cook the turkey EDF?’ they asked!
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 being 8,000 has now increased 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 pounds and rising. How is the country going to pay for this and all the other pie in the sky 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 Mrs Thatcher, to partially build HPC. Not one of these will be accountable for the toxic high level radioactive waste that will be sat on the Severn Estuary coastline far into the future – 200 years and beyond – for our children’s children to pay for and deal with. The level of radioactivity of the waste will be in total 80 percent 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 are faltering over their 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 is last century and is wasteful of energy. The steam process results in two thirds of the heat energy (6 Giga Watt) being pumped out into the estuary. Stop Hinkley continues to hold EDF to account, and will be watching, and will be back for the next predicted finish date of 2027 with their Christmas turkey