There is a deeply worrying unspoken aspect of this heatwave and that is the profligate use of our stressed freshwater resource by the nuclear industry. The hotter the weather the more freshwater is required for processes including the one absolutely essential to protect all life on planet earth from humanity’s greatest hubris – and that is the cooling of high level radioactive wastes. The industry requires top quality water not the rubbish that was given to folk in West Cumbria from the boreholes near Sellafield – nope the industry requires the coolest freshest waster including from Britains most iconic lake.
For Fifteen years now Radiation Free Lakeland have been flagging up the nuclear industry’s eyewatering use of our most precious resource, freshwater. For fifteen years the main stream media have shied away from the issue preferring to flag up the freshwater use of fracking which is big and very nasty but on a different scale both in time and quantity of freshwater involved .
Despite the nuclear industry insisting that the public should not have access to information on fresh water use for reasons of ‘national security’ we now have a body of documentation from (largely blacked out) Freedom of Information requests and research which shows that the nuclear industry’s freshwater use is on a scale second to none. The nuclear industry’s abuse of fresh water continues long after other industrys’ fracking, fossil fuel etc will have come and gone.
We have been told by diligent fracking activists that the figure from the hydraulic fracture plan for Cuadrilla was up to 31,000 cubic metres of water to frack the first well. This was based on up to 765 cubic metres per stage. The number of stages in the fracture plan was 41. That is a lot, it is too much and thanks to diligence of fracking campaigners (nuclear campaigners also fought fracking) this was stopped in its tracks. The ALREADY monstrous freshwater use by the nuclear industry in the Preston area was flagged up by nuclear campaigners.
Springfields Nuclear Fuels just off Preston New Road discharges at least 2400 cubic metres A DAY into the River Ribble. The fresh water discharge contains chemical and radioactive contamination – but the industry say this is fine as the super large quantities of fresh water used “dilute and disperse” the nasties.
Springfields Nuclear Fuels which is slap bang in the middle of Cuadrilla’s fracking plans on the Fylde has recieved no, nada, zilch attention over its fresh water use.
The video illustrates information painstakingly gleaned about Springfields freshwater use along with Sellafield’s. The front and the back end of the nuclear industry which are neatly tucked away under a cloak of invisibility in the NW. Sellafield’s abusive use of the Lake District’s freshwater is detailed in the video taken from a talk at New Horizons, St Annes. Lets hope the rain falls soon to replenish our Lakes and Rivers which have been flushing cool water over hot nuclear wastes since the 1940s. The new build plan would mean more and ever hotter wastes to cool into infinity . Our Lakes and rivers are finite.
This abuse of our fresh water has been going on now since the 1940s. Who knew? and Who Cares?
RADIATION FREE LAKELAND 
Is there no part of our lives that the Nuclear industry, in our case Sellafield don’t have priority? I have asked many times, As people living on the same planet as us, how do they even look in the mirror in the morning let alone face us the people, they take so much from, at the same time as publishing their propaganda of how wonderful the work is they are doing and how caring they are for the community? Will they be telling us they are doing us a favour by using the best quality water as anything less is better for out health.