Standing in a field close to the Somerset coast surrounded by her flock of sheep, Juliet Pankhurst shook her head. “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said. “They want to flood this land that has been farmed for generations. We’ve got great crested newts in the pond over there, water voles in the ditches, hares all over the place. They’ll be lost.”
Her partner, Mark Halliwell, shrugged. “But they’ll get their way – they always do. No matter what scheme they come up with.”
The “they” in question is EDF, the French company building the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station a few miles down the coast from the farm. The scheme is to create a salt marsh on the land as “compensation” for dropping an innovative plan to stop millions of fish from swimming into the plant’s cooling system and being killed.
“The whole thing sounds a bit odd,” said Pankhurst.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The scheme is to create a salt marsh on the land as “compensation” for dropping an innovative plan to stop millions of fish from swimming into the plant’s cooling system and being killed.
Under the system, almost 300 underwater “sound projectors” would have boomed noise louder than a jumbo jet into the sea to deter fish from entering the plant’s water intakes, nearly two miles offshore.
But EDF has changed its mind on the system, arguing that installing and maintaining it would risk the lives of divers working in the fast-flowing, murky water and expressing concerns about the impact of the noise on porpoises, seals, whales.
Scores of people (under the watchful eye of a police community support officer) turned up for a meeting at Pawlett village hall this week as part of EDF’s consultation on the proposal.
When the Guardian asked EDF representatives at the event how the cost of the “compensation” proposals compared with the price of an AFD system, the response was that the salt marsh scheme was at the “concept” stage, so there were no figures.
In the consultation overview document, NNB Generation Company (HPC), the EDF subsidiary set up to build and operate Hinkley Point C, says there are no examples of AFD systems being installed permanently in the “harsh conditions” found in this part of the Bristol Channel.
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