Ignorance of the facts shouldn't lead to criticism.

by Aidan - IMC Mon Mar 04, 2002 14:32

I'm starting by reposting this comment in reponse to our friend from BNFL

taken from the Sunday times;

Ronald Hanas who supervised storage of materials at Sellafield, has made the following complaints about the plant;

1. Failure to register 328 items of radioactive material.

2. Illegal storage of radioactive materials in a warehouse in a nearby town.

3. The loan of radioactive material to unauthorised recipient.

4. Transport of plutonium on public highways in unsuitable containers.

5. Repeatadly leaving radioactive material unsupervised.

6. Tampering of seals on containers so radioactive material could be moved without check.

7. Allowing water from storage ponds to precolate into water tables.

Would Mister BNFL employee like to answer any of these charges.....

Also, in 1999, it was proven that BNFL had forged the safety checks on radioactive material, writing down the serial numbers from previous loads because they couldn't be bothered going through these checks again.

Secondly, again in 1999, the Mark Thomas Production, showed how trains carrying nuclear waste to Sellafield, had no guards, and the driver had to get out of the carriage, close crossing, and then reopen then after his train had passed. A ludricous situation.

These aren't failings BNFL reported. These were failings BNFL were forced to admit. Highlightly the fact that you can't even stand up to your own safety measures.

Sellafield isn't safe. And post September 11th the threat of a terrorist attack as highlighted the meance on our coast. The people who went to Sellafield of their own free will (unpaid, sling your accusations somewhere else, the campaign againist Sellafield is alive and strong in this country)because of the threat it poses to our environment, and our lifes.

You're not to going to win any converts with your lesser of two evils attitude mate. The £2 billion you talked about is for the Mox reprocessing planet, a facility which is already out of date and unnecessary, and it's not British Nuclear waste it's reprocessing it's foreign fuel brought to you.

Don't try your selective facts on this crowd, we're literate and well informed. You talk about how we'd be forced to use Carbon and Fossil Fuels if we shut down Nuclear power, well I'd be curious to know what alternative energy researchs could have developed with your £2billion, as long as we rely on Nuclear Power, and Toxic forms of energy we'd behaving in a short sighted manner, not planning for our childrens future.

Aidan

by ciara Mon Mar 04, 2002 14:38

Sellafield is safe? Really? Pity no one told all those protestors that. Would've saved a lot of people long hard, journeys.

by Mike Mon Mar 04, 2002 15:19 stepbystepfarm at shaysnet dot com

You, my friend, admit to being an "employee" and perhaps you are looking in the mirror when you imagine that people wouldn't be taking sides in this unless they were paid to do so.

So it's "well known" is it? Well maybe things are different on your side of the pond but in over three decades protesting this or that I have never met anybody who got paid for it. Oh sure, there are a few "paid organizers" for some of the organizations, if you call sipends perhaps as about as generous as a grad student starves on "pay". And sure, often a distant organization chips in among its members who aren't going to contribute toward travel expenses of those who do. But PAY, that's b....s....

by Aidan Mon Mar 04, 2002 16:12

You asked if we'd like to see the world revert back to thousands of windmills.......

Well yeah actually I would....

10,000 electricity generating windmills, on a sandbank off the coast would go a long way towards doing you out of a job and providing plenty of energy.

Safe and clean energy.

Aidan
-I feel I should make a Don Quixote quote here-

by Anarchy99 Mon Mar 04, 2002 16:47

You say "Nuclear energy is one of the cleanest, and cheapest products utilised to produce electricity. Virtually no CO2 emissions are released into the atmosphere. If nuclear power production ceased, gas and coal powered plants would become our electricity producers - contributing up to 55 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year in the United Kingdom alone."

I say, nuclear fuel takes 4,000 years to properly bio degrade and within that time it causes many variants of cancer and unmeasurable damage to the environment, clean no! Cheap no! considering you have 4000 years of ecological damage, now thats a high price to pay. BTW no one against nuclear fuel advocates gas and coal powered plants, it tends to be more along the line of non profit making renewable power like solar and wind.

by Grattan Healy - Energy Adviser, greens, European Parliament Mon Mar 04, 2002 17:55 grattan_healy at compuserve dot com

A few more facts might assist this tense discussion.

At the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy Conference in 1958 in Geneva, Dr Jon Dunster from Windscale (now Sellafield) stated: "The intention has been to discharge fairly substantial amounts of radioactivity as part of an organised and deliberate scientific experiment ..the aims of this experiment would have been defeated if the level of radioactivity discharged had been kept to a minimum.". Experiment on who or what? Us obviously! (see: http://www.nuclear-free.com/english/speech.htm)

Was the 1957 fire safe? We are still living with the consequences, despite the denials on both sides of the Irish Sea.

Research is showing that the bulk of the incidence of cancer is within 100 metres of the Irish Sea coast - both Wales and Ireland, and most likely elsewhere as well. BNFL, you have the deaths of thousands of people on your hands.

Radiation standards understate the health effects (on us) by a factor of approximately one hundred. In other words the exposure we are getting is NOT SAFE, and that also applies to the Sellafield employees and residents of Cumbria. (see the LLRC site linked here).

The High Level Waste (HLW) tanks at Sellafield (and similar ones at La Hague in France) pose the single greatest nuclear threat in Europe. They are quite unstable, since they require continuous refrigeration. Loss of coolant accidents have almost occurred on several occasions at both sites. Once lost, the tanks would boil unstoppably and spew their poison over most of the British Isles, giving rise to a possible accident 100 times that of Chernobyl (this is well documented, by experts like Peter Taylor, but rarely discussed). Under the wrong wind conditions, evacuation of Ireland could become necessary. BNFL have fumbled for years trying to vitrify this waste, while their French colleagues appeared to have managed. When I visited siome yaers ago, the plant wasn't working at all. I gather that the rate of vitrification isn't keeping pace with the production of new HLW, so this frightening risk remains as bad as ever.

On economics, Mr BNFL's arguments just don't stack up at all. Even with all of the subsidies (declared and hidden), no one wants to buy the industry, and a major reason for closure is lack of economic viability (the USA being the prime example). Cost estimates generally assume burial of the waste, which just isn't going to be allowed to happen. Some of the isotopes have half-lives of 250,000 years, so who is going to pay the security guards wages, when no electricity is being generated for the next million years???

What is more, there is a massive hidden subsidy to nuclear. In the event of an accident at the likes of Sellafield, the compensation to be paid by BNFL is limited to some hundreds of millions under the Paris and Vienna Conventions. Anything above that is the responsibility the country which caused the accident. Clearly in the case of BNFL, we could be talking about trillions. Unlike the renewables and fossil energies, nuclear cannot get insurance to cover its full public liability – Lloyds won't even quote a premium, especially after Chernobyl. Curiously, even though the authorities effectively provide this insurance for the nuclear industry, the likes of BNFL are not asked to pay for it at all, never mind at commercial rates. The reason is that it would make nuclear electricity at least 10 times more expensive (according to the research of the Swiss/German Prognos Institute and may others).

This point has been made to the European Commission by the Green Group, as it is a distortion of the European Electricity Market. The Competition Commissioner Mario Monti apparently agrees, but guess what, the pro-nuclear European Commission won't tackle this thorny issue.

Mr BNFL employee, you are working in a murderous industry, which is in its death throes, thank God. Belgium just announced the end of its nuclear project, and the only major nuclear dinosaurs in Europe are in the UK. Keep an eye on the employment pages.

by amanda Mon Mar 04, 2002 20:03

The only people who were paid to be at Sellafield on February 14th were BNFL workers, police and reporters. (Oh and the bus drivers we paid to drive us there!) I know this because I was there and had spent months previously helping to organise the protests. Despite the hours upon hours of unpaid work I and many others put into organising the action I personally paid 70euro to go and took time off work which I lost pay for. Granted our costs were lowered by fundraising, but I dont think the people of my city emptying the contents of their wallets into our buckets constitutes any of us being paid to protest.
You feel a need to assume we are paid to do this work because you are paid to do yours. Your position will always be coloured by the fact you recieve money from BNFL. My fear of nuclear power has nothing to do with money, the environmental groups who publisise the dangers of nuclear energy stand to gain nothing from pionting them out.
I wish I could believe Sellafield was safe, I wish it was. It would mean that the time and energy I focus on anti nuclear campaigns could be spent on something else. (Granted being at Sellafield for Valentines day was infinetly preferable to listening to my friend complain that no-one got her flowers........) But at the end of the day, I have spent years of fearing for my safety, months of planning actions and awareness events, weeks of stressing about them, days of fatigue travelling to them, all in order to spend one day of enduring no sleep, standing outside in the freezing cold in rain while occasionally getting hit by police. Then when that day ends I go home and begin working on our next step, and all at a personal, financial cost. This is not my idea of a fun and enjoyable way to spend my life. But I do not believe nuclear energy is safe, and at least at the end of the day I know exactly what drives me, and deep down I can trust and believe myself, and I can look my eyes in the mirror and not flinch.

by iosaf ipsiphi O'as if Sat Aug 16, 2003 22:36

Sellafield / THORP / windscale
risk factors were alwasy made against factors seen as being closer to constant than the really big variables such as airplanes bumping into them or indeed water running out.

water is very important stuff.
so too is weather... you don't go leaving the stuff to chance even if your technology is immature...