RAB (‘Ridiculous Atomic Bailout’)
Varrie Blowers considers nuclear costs after warnings from Citizens Advice and Office for Budget Responsibility in the March edition of Regional Life magazine
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Great British nuclear fantasy…
Andy Blowers looks at the implications for Bradwell of the Government’s Nuclear Roadmap to 2050- in the BANNG column for Regional Life February 2024
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‘Look to your own backyard’ BANNG tells MP
Press Release – 31 January, 2024
The Blackwater Against New Nuclear Group (BANNG) is deeply concerned about the support of Therese Coffey, MP, for Bradwell as the logical landfall site for the substation and converter linking the East Anglian offshore wind farms to the on-land national grid. ‘In her disingenuous attempt to divert the infrastructure from Suffolk to Essex she displays a profound ignorance of the situation,’ says Professor Andrew Blowers, OBE, Chair of BANNG.
Click here to read the Press Release in full.
On the Road(map) to Nowhere!
Press Release – 12 January, 2024
Government’s New Civil Nuclear Roadmap effectively rules out Bradwell.
Despite the Government’s recent re-announcement of a massive expansion of civil nuclear power, the Blackwater Against New Nuclear Group (BANNG) believes new nuclear at Bradwell remains dead in the water. In future new nuclear power stations will only be sited in ‘suitable locations’ identified by developers based on a set of criteria. The Government also welcomes ‘responses from any communities that think they may benefit from the social and economic opportunities that new nuclear power can deliver’.
Professor Andy Blowers, the Chair of BANNG, commented, ‘This new approach to siting effectively rules Bradwell out of any further consideration. As we have strenuously demonstrated over the last fifteen years Bradwell is a most unsuitable site and the Blackwater communities are overwhelmingly opposed to nuclear development in such a fragile location, increasingly vulnerable to the impacts of Climate Change’.
Click here to read the Press Release in full.
It is not a fair COP(28)!
Andrew Blowers explains in the January 2024 edition of Regional Life
The UN annual global meeting on Climate Change, known as COP, took place in Dubai at the end of last year. Its location, in an oil rich country in a hot desert environment, speaks volumes about the nature of the problem, its causes and the challenge of dealing with it.
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Inside Bradwell’s Dark Secrets
The first time I had a guided tour of Bradwell Power Station was about 30 years ago. Although we were viewing from a gallery high up, workers way down below were toiling away, effectively walking above the reactor, itself many feet beneath them.
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Climate Change – is it ever too late?
Andrew Blowers asks if it is possible we may yet avert catastrophe in the November 2023 issue of Regional Life
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Climate Change – is it ever too late?
Andrew Blowers asks if it is possible we may yet avert catastrophe in the November 2023 issue of Regional Life
Click here to read the article in full.≈
Dunkelflaute (or… can we keep the lights on when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine?)
Prof. Andrew Blowers tackles this question in the October column for Regional Life:
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Essex: Land of Wetlands, Wastelands and Wildlife
Andrew Blowers explores this topic in the BANNG column for Regional Life, September, 2023
Essex has an estimated 300 – 350 miles of coastline, probably the longest of any English county, meandering around its five estuaries. There are more than thirty islands, mostly saltmarsh and mudbanks but including larger populated islands such as Canvey and Mersea. This is a remarkably diverse and eerily beautiful land of big skies and mysterious marshlands, a land constantly changing under the restless rhythms of weather, wind and tides. And, overall, in the longer term, Climate Change is increasing the pressures on this precious landscape as sea- level rises and higher temperatures impact on these fragile shores.
But, it is also a land shaped by human activities and threatened by development past and present. Some parts of the Essex waterlands were once wastelands and parts still are, for Essex has long been regarded and (ab)used as a dumping ground, the outlet for London’s, and to an extent the nation’s, rubbish, sewage, toxic and even radioactive wastes.
Click here to read the article in full.
Is it “Hello” or “Goodbye” to Great British Nuclear Power?
Andrew Blowers contemplates this question in the BANNG column for Regional Life, August, 2023
The frenzied relaunch of Great British Nuclear (GBN) as the vehicle to produce 24GW of nuclear power (i.e. a quarter of Britain’s electricity) was long on rhetoric and short on commitment. The prospect of low carbon nuclear power sometime in the future – albeit costly, slow, accident-prone and with a legacy of dangerous wastes – seemed a soothing distraction from the present reality of heatwaves, wildfires, warming oceans and rapidly melting ice.
But, nuclear power cannot escape the reality of an insecure and unsafe future with global warming and sea-level rise. In the immediate future, individual nuclear stations will be affected by floods, storms, heatwaves and droughts. Increasing temperatures will affect cooling systems reducing power output as thermal efficiency decreases. In the longer-term, nuclear power may face an existential crisis especially where stations, like Bradwell, are sited on coasts prone to flooding, erosion and storm surges as sea-level rises.
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Fish Hell…
Varrie Blowers looks at the devastating impacts of sea water cooling systems on the marine environment in the July 2023 edition of Regional Life
What amounts to a ‘fish hell’ is being proposed at the Hinkley Point C (HPC) new nuclear power station. This provides an indication of what might happen on the Blackwater if a new nuclear station or so-called Small Modular Reactors were ever built here.
Click here to read the article in full.
Bradwell Revisited – echoes of 1980s as Government looks for somewhere to dump radioactive waste
Andrew Blowers records how protests stopped nuclear dumping at Bradwell and would likely do so again in the June 2023 BANNG column for Regional Life
Older readers will recollect the battle that raged as mass protests saw off Government plans for a nuclear dump at Bradwell in the 1980s. The Government is again looking at existing nuclear sites in which to bury some of the nation’s nuclear wastes. Bradwell may be in its sights but is wholly unsuitable and any attempt to develop a dump here will once again be seen off by massive local protest and opposition.
Click here to read the article in full.
New Nuclear – Same Old Sites
Andrew Blowers suggests the old Bradwell site is no place for new nuclear in the BANNG May 2023 column for Regional Life
In a renewed effort to kickstart the comatose nuclear industry, the Government has just embarked on an incredible – and quite unachievable – programme to deliver new nuclear power stations at the rate of one reactor a year rather than one a decade.
But where are the suitable sites for a varied fleet of large Gigawatt behemoths and not-so-large, so-called Small Modular Reactors?
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15 years of BANNG – the battle continues
Andy and Varrie Blowers discuss the last 15 years of campaigning in the BANNG Column for Regional Life, April 2023
Since the April of 2008 BANNG’s aim has been ‘to protect the people and environment of the River Blackwater estuary and its surrounding area, now and in the future, from the risks and dangers of radioactivity by preventing the further development of nuclear activity in the estuary’.
Over 15 years of campaigns to raise public awareness – including a 10,000 signature face-to-face Petition – and lobbying of MPs, Local Authorities and others, BANNG has been unswerving in pursuing this aim.
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Graphite – deadly dirt or dusty diamonds?
BANNG’s Coordinator Peter Banks exposes the hidden danger lurking on the Blackwater in the March 2023 column for Regional Life.
When the Great Tide Returns
Andy Blowers reflects on the Great Tide of 1953 and inexorable Sea Level Rise in the BANNG column for the February 2023 edition of Regional Life
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That was the Year That Was…
Andy Blowers summarises the past year for the Bradwell B project in the BANNG column for the January 2023 edition of Regional Life
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‘They think it’s all over’…Is it now?
Andy Blowers considers the Bradwell B project is over and doubts whether small reactors will come to pass in the BANNG column for Regional Life, December, 2022
The slow demise of the gigantic new nuclear power station planned for Bradwell seems like an endless game of Chinese Whispers. The Chinese company, China General Nuclear Power Group (CGN), has still wistfully clung on until all hope has vanished.
Yet, hope springs eternal in the nuclear world. No sooner has the Chinese project entered a state of endless sleep than the upstart Rolls-Royce SMR floats the absurd idea of building a flotilla of (not so) Small Modular Reactors (SMR) on the Bradwell site. Does such a prospect stand a prayer? I don’t think so.
Click here to read the article in full.