There's a hole in DECC's bucket
Michael Harrison from the Environment Agency telephoned Radiation Free Lakeland
this morning to confirm that while the Still Waters Partnership meeting had not mentioned nuclear
impacts on Cumbria’s freshwater resources there have been discussions within the EA, DECC and the nuke industry
about the problem of just where the freshwater will come from for the cooling of nuke wastes and new build.
The ‘solution’ which has been put forward by the industry and others is a desalination plant on the West Coast.
Proposed nuke plants in the south would also require new sources of freshwater.
Cumbria is the wettest place in England and there is not enough freshwater to supply the ferocious needs of
the nuclear industry. A World Wildlife Fund report has said “Desalinating the sea is an expensive, energy
intensive and greenhouse gas-emitting way to get water.”
http://waterwebster.org/documents/desalinationreportjune2007.pdf
Apart from the massive amounts of energy needed to power a desalination plant and the impacts on marine life, there is also the added bonus of the accumulated caesium and plutonium on the shifing seabed silts. Caesium and plutonium would be dredged up into a desalination plant to be concentrated into waste salts.
Another cunning plan!
Desalination Plants contribute massively to destruction of marine life causing the kind of domino effect described in this video..
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/national-geographic-channel/all-videos/av-9649-9983/ngc-last-remaining-mystery-shark.html It examines the deaths of up to 1,000 or more seals washed up on Sable Island off the Canadian coast and the investigations that have been carried out indicating that these deaths were/are being caused by the Greenland Sharks now hunting in shallow water, their behaviour having been modified by the collapse of the fisheries in the North West Atlantic and the shark’s need to find an alternate source of food. Seal remains were indeed found in the stomachs of the sharks caught. The Greenland Sharks now apparently hunt seals resting below water; they spring an ambush when the seals are sleeping using their electro receptors and sense of smell. They have jaws that can cut in both directions acting like a reciprocating saw, so when attacking/eating the seal their jaws cause the cork screw lacerations found. It would seem that maybe these animals have now migrated to the North East Atlantic where the fisheries are also collapsing, so indicating yet another catastrophic human activity caused by creating imbalance in the marine food chain.
Unbelievable – the fells are totally soggy; it rains more days than not; the waterfalls roar at Lodore and Aira force – but there isn’t enough water in Cumbria??
After the experience in Japan, we’d need to make sure that any source of cooling water never ever stops working for any reason whatsoever …….it gets ever more complicated, which must mean more expensive than factored in originally. Time to go back to the drawing board.