Dear Editor,
Whatever our views are about the use of nuclear fission to generate heat to drive electricity generating turbines we must consider the location of these huge and potentially dangerous facilities.
The U235 isotopes used in these reactors and their waste isotopes remain a hazard to humanity for a thousand years.The enormous difficulties in the management of these and smaller, radio active isotopes and associated waste is only now becoming apparent with current problems at Sellafield. Sellafield is not an eroding and subsiding beach.
If we are to build these nuclear fission reactors then safe location is paramount.The last place to build these reactors is on a subsiding and rapidly eroding beach at Sizewell in the face of a rising sea level.The reactors and the radioactive waste on that beach will eventually and inevitably go into the sea. The consequences will be catastrophic.
Far from building another nuclear fission reactor on Sizewell beach, we should be addressing ourselves to the decommissioning of the existing reactors and the removal of the U235 waste before it is too late.
Dungeness is growing every year. Hinkley point is a rising coastline. The West coast of France is rising. But Sizewell beach is subsiding and eroding. Vast tracts of the Suffolk coastline, including houses, land and lighthouses have been lost to the sea in the last few years.
Whatever our views are about the continued building of nuclear fission power stations, Sizewell beach is the wrong place to build such a facility. To do so will leave another catastrophic and poisonous legacy for future generations to endure.
It is the wrong place.Please think again and try to prevent this madness before it is too late. I write to you on behalf of our children’s children.
Martin Deighton
Woodbridge, Suffolk
