Thousands sign to stop mud dump
NEARLY 60,000 people have signed two petitions calling on the Welsh Government to suspend a licence that will allow 300,000 tonnes of mud from a disused nuclear power station to be dumped off Cardiff’s coast.
EDF energy has a licence which will allow it to dump up to 200,000 cubic metres of dredged material from the old Hinkley Point A and B nuclear sites on an area known as Cardiff Grounds, near Cardiff Bay.
The company says it needs to carry out the dredging to build the new Hinkley Point C reactor at a neighbouring site on the Somerset coast.
One of the petitions was started on September 26 by Tim Deere-Jones, who has been analysing data found from the tests conducted on the materials which could be dumped off the coast of Wales.
It argues “we are concerned that the environmental and human health (dose) risks from the proposed disposal have not been adequately researched and that any conclusions based on the current incomplete data, are unreliable”.
It adds: “While sedimentary radioactive material is initially likely to disperse, studies prove that it later reconcentrates in coastal and estuarine mudflats and saltmarshes, and is also available for sea-to-land transfer during onshore winds and coastal flooding. We note the absence of research on the fate of such radioactivity in South Wales inshore waters.”
That petition on the National Assembly’s website has attracted 6,920 signatures.
A separate petition on the website sumofus.org has received 50,883 signatures, bringing the total as of yesterday to 57,803.
It says: “We can’t let big corporations get away with polluting our waters to cut costs – it’s up to us to fight back. There are 50 different harmful radionuclides, but testing only took place for three of these.
“What’s more, only surface samples were taken – meaning that the actual radioactivity of the waste could be five times higher than claimed.”
The licence to dump the waste as part of the £19.6bn nuclear power station project was granted in 2013 by the Welsh Government.
The area being dredged is near to the older Hinkley Point A nuclear power station, which was decommissioned in 2000 after 35 years in operation.
Cardiff Grounds is an extensive sandbank in the Bristol Channel which lies parallel to the coast around 1.2 miles out.
An EDF Energy spokesman said: “We will be dredging sediment from the seabed off the Hinkley Point C site ahead of drilling six vertical shafts for the cooling water system for the new nuclear power station. We consulted a number of stakeholders, some for more than 12 months, before making an application to the Welsh Government Marine Consents Unit for a Marine Licence to deposit this material at the Cardiff Grounds licensed disposal site. We have undertaken a number of assessments as part of this application which concluded the activities pose no threat to human health or the environment.
“All activities on our sites are strictly controlled and regulated by a number of statutory bodies to ensure the environment and public are protected.”