To: Owen Paterson and European Parliament, Matthias Groote chairman
Stop nuclear power station development in Gloucestershire
Horizon Nuclear Power, the company planning to build a new nuclear power station in South Gloucestershire, has agreed contracts with four major firms to provide engineering and other technical services. Despite what the nuclear industry tells us, building enough nuclear power stations to make a meaningful reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is not economical(!) and creates tens of thousands of tons of lethal high-level radioactive waste, contributing to further proliferation of nuclear weapons materials, and results in a Chernobyl-scale accident once every decade. Perhaps most significantly, it will squander the resources necessary to implement meaningful climate change solutions. Beautiful England and Gloucestershire do not want to be ruined by the nuclear industry .
Why is this important?
We cannot bury our heads in the sand. There is nothing clean or good about nuclear energy. We are left with a legacy of nuclear waste and horrific nuclear pollution. This is not something I want future generations to have to live with. It is not responsible to use energy that has the potential to be so dangerous and destructive as we clearly have seen with Chernobyl, Fukushima - how many examples do governments need before this madness is stopped. No matter how profitable nuclear power is to government, this means nothing if peoples, air, rain, and environment are at some point in the future polluted with radiation . The risks are too high and cannot be justified. Radioactive pollution can be a very dangerous thing because radiation mutates DNA, causing abnormal growth and possibly cancer, and this radiation remains in the atmosphere for years, slowly diminishing over time. Treatment of radiation waste cannot be done through degradation by chemical or biological processes. Additionally, many radioactive materials have very long half-times (time necessary for half of the material to degrade or transform into non-radioactive materials) and thus radiation waste may pose a risk for many years after it was produced.