Moorside would be “Chernobyl on Steroids”

Arnie Gundersen Looking Out over “Moorside” Beckermet towards Sellafield.  The green fields between Sellafield and Beckermet are already being drilled with 100 “exploratory” boreholes for “Moorside”

Arnie Gundersen at St Bridget’s, Beckermet

Arnie Gundersen blows the whistle on Moorside in the Business Section of The Independent.  It has to be asked “where are the investigative environmental journalists?”  Are they all On Message with government’s new build agenda?  The local press so far appear to be far more interested in Keswick School banning Arnie Gundersen than in the content of what he has to say about Moorside.

Good for Arnie Gundersen.  This is the first really powerful note of caution in the national press.  The first of many!

“Mr Gundersen, who visited the Sellafield nuclear facility in Cumbria last week, warned that any leak would be like “Chernobyl on steroids”

He said: “Evacuation of Moorside would have to be up to 50 miles..”  “If this leaks it would be a leak worse than the one at Fukushima. Historically, there have been 66 containment leaks around the world.”

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Arnie Gundersen has also told Radiation Free Lakeland that there are “many weaknesses that the public should be made aware of”.

He has told us that:

1. I do think the choice of three AP1000’s near Sellafield is a poor decision. Three units simply will not fit! Construction needs and siting of the switchyard and siting the intake and discharge piping cannot be sandwiched into that small site. More land is required, driving costs up.
2. The network of roads will make emergency evacuation planning difficult. The sea and the mountains force evacuation southward.
3. Cooling towers cannot be used because the towers would pull water from the Irish Sea and the drift from the towers would contain radiological contamination from Sellafield! That then forces heated discharges directly into the Irish sea through pipes perhaps three miles off shore, which stirs up benthic contamination too.

                  4. The transmission corridor cannot be a single line of towers through               the national forest (N Park) , but should be two corridors at least 10 miles apart. Two separate transmission corridors are needed for both grid reliability and nuclear safety.

5. Constructing three units in six years has never been successfully achieved. The construction schedule is a fantasy, as are the costs.
6. In addition to the site permits, permitting for the heat discharges and the transmission corridors will add years to the process.

 The net effect is that the AP1000’s will be much more costly and time consuming than authorities would like the UK to believe”.