INDEX	January 11, 2024
A new nuclear power station?
So Sellafield, or Sellotape as we call it, is going to get another nuclear power station, or it might happen. The Windscale (ie Sellafield, they changed the name to re-brand it) fire of 10 October 1957 was the worst nuclear accident in the United Kingdom's history, and one of the worst in the world, ranked in severity at level 5 out of 7 on the International Nuclear Event Scale. Right now there are proposals to have a long term nuclear waste facility under the coast just down the road from where I am living. We already have the Walney Wind Farm, the second largest in the world, clearly visible from Millom. Under the nearby hills there is a huge magma chamber making the area highly suitable for geothermal generation. There is a long standing scheme to have a tidal barrage across the Duddon, the huge estuary that flows into (and out of) Millom. It has one of the largest tidal ranges in the UK. Now I can understand the bureaucratic mind likes to have tidy schemes and it makes some sort of sense to site a power station next to the country's nuclear waste reprocessing centre. But what do we need all this energy for? There are few people in the area and the only heavy industry I know about is the Barrow shipyard. Surely that doesn't need all that much power? Meanwhile people are putting solar panels on their houses (a very marginal thing to do in cloudy Cumberland) in order to benefit from Government subsidies.
INDEX Jonathan Brind		January 11, 2024