A nature reserve is to be flooded by the developer of the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant at a cost of £50m to compensate for the death of fish in its cooling pipes.
An 840 acre swathe of land along the Parrett estuary in Somerset will be transformed into salt marsh as a habitat for marine life to replace fish sucked in by the new power station’s cooling ducts.
The area affected – part of the Somerset levels, where Saxon king Alfred the Great is said to have hidden from the Vikings – includes farmers’ fields used for grazing, as well as a nature reserve.
EDF, the French company building Hinkley Point, will create a new nature reserve nearby to replace the land being lost. The overall changes are expected to cost it £50m.
One of the reasons nuclear costs so much of course. That gubbins like this has to be done.
As opposed to, say, wind, which doesn;t have to pay for the birds it chops up, does it?
This is a truly stupid requirement. A nice compact power station producing oodles of electricity 24/7 has to turn 840 acres of historic farmland into a salty swamp. As you point out, unlike the windmills which cover the landscape, produce varying quantities of unreliable electricity and chop up birds with gay abandon.
I naturally feel that, if God had meant us to ruin the farm from which King Alfred got his turnips, he wouldn’t have invented uranium.
EDF were outraged at the constraints imposed by English civil servants who entered the negotiations with calculations showing that digging a hole in the ground and filling it with water would cost £500.
“We stand to lose £100 milion on the deal!” commented Pierre Cardin, chief engineer at EDF. Apparently the civil servants had overlooked several highly complex problems that had to be solved, but after extended research bargained EDF down to this rock bottom price.
I’m sometimes amazed at the creativity shown by those obstructing development of energy, industry etc. Imagine what we could do if it was directed to something productive.
Could be a nice little earner… Especially given the price of fish nowadays.
Hadn’t thought of that one Grikath. But I do wonder if most of those 46 tonnes would be found to be below legal size, forbidden to catch during that period etc.
I’m sure the civil servants could dig something up.
Dungeness has a strange waterwheel contraption that sweeps up the fish that get into the inlet and deposits them in a pool that leads to the outlet, which is nice because it is a lot warmer.
Occasionally a smart seal gets in past the wire mesh and has its own all you can eat buffet and free rides on the wheel.
Hah! I once took a party of undergraduates to a large, coastal power station, accompanied by a bumptious colleague. When we reached the sea-water bit of the plant he asked the operator what his commonest problem was. “Seals”. My colleague turned to the students and said “He doesn’t mean the marine mammals but the devices that hold a rotating shaft.”
“No” said the operator, “I mean the marine mammals”.
commented Pierre Cardin, chief engineer at EDF.
Versatile bloke. I’ve got one of his suits & her ladyship a couple of handbags. Should look good when it’s built, then. Hopefully, it’s not tartan this season.
Martin on M25,
Have a look at this lovely lots’ efforts. It’s a long thread and shows some wonderful examples of how our planning laws are abused:
“ The @BristolCivicSoc are a group of NIMBYs opposed to any development in Bristol. When a proposal is not tall, they object citing the housing crisis. When a proposal is tall, it’s carbon emissions. A of their insane objections.”
https://x.com/jrbross_/status/1780153316552380476?s=61&t=VX5cJ0-osgn_JSz7j-uowQ
Respect to the Bristol Civic Soc. for using both hands of the state against each other.
46 tonnes of fish being less than 1 gram per person in the UK per year, they know we eat them right?
I’m now working out the unit for mass of dead fish per amount of energy generated and I think it ends up as metres squared, seconds to the minus 3, but open to correction.
UK Gov:
” In 2019, UK vessels landed 622 thousand tonnes of sea fish with a value of £987 million”.
It’s early and I can’t be arsed to figure out how manys £’s worth 46 tonnes of fish is, but i’m pretty certain it’s a bit less than £50 million …………………………