The news about the consortium set up to look into building nuclear power stations is very good news for the area.

Only last month The Daily Telegraph was stating that nuclear’s days were numbered and that the Chinese government would like to walk away from Hinkley.

I wonder if the Cummings / Gove Government has had a bout of socialism and are going to invest British money into a British project?

We will have to wait and see if the blonde-haired chap that talks like Churchill makes any announcements.

PETER GILBERT

Seascale

Against Moorside

Back in 2014 Radiation Free Lakeland said “Stop Moorside”. Well we did! Now it appears we have to do it all over again.

The nuclear industry is super keen to promote itself as clean energy and is being supported in this aim by the Cumbria Local Enterprise Partnership who are gaslighting Cumbrians by including nuclear in their “Clean Energy Sector Panel”.

They say they have done a “feasibility study” and found the Moorside site to be “suitable” for new nuclear.

Whoever did this “feasibility study” had tunnel vision.

The Moorside site adjacent to the sprawling Sellafield nuclear waste site is not suitable for any sort of development – let alone new nuclear development, no matter how prettily it is dressed up in green garb.

Here are just a few reasons why.

Nuclear is not “clean energy” – the latest quarterly report from the Offices of Nuclear Regulation with its catalogue of reported leaks from the Sellafield site is testament to how the site operates like a leaky bucket, with Sellafield’s wastes from tritium to plutonium impacting on the surrounding land and sea.

The Moorside site itself is contaminated with Sellafield’s waste, including americium and tritium.

West Cumbria’s freshwater is stressed (Sellafield uses a lot of fresh water, new nuclear would use even more of this precious resource). Because of the stressed freshwater supply in West Cumbria, freshwater from boreholes is now supplementing the public supply. The proposed Moorside site would be less than a mile from these boreholes.

The Sellafield and Moorside site are at “high risk of liquefaction” according to two recent independent reports – one from geologists (Cross, Martin and Attya, Anass and Evans, David J. A. (2018) and one from marine biologist and pollution expert Tim Deere Jones who in writing about the plan for the coal mine off St Bees said there is a real potential for subsidence to occur as a result of the “mass removal” and the creation of extensive sub-sea void spaces, and it is noted that such subsidence could generate earthquake and liquefaction effects which may extend onshore as far as the Sellafield/Moorside sites.

There are more reasons but these are more than enough to be going on with to scrap this dangerous Moorside plan.

The land near Sellafield should be used to monitor the ongoing and we hope reducing contamination of land and sea following decades of exposure to Sellafield’s nuclear and chemical wastes. That land should not be used to produce ever more nuclear and chemical waste.

MARIANNE BIRKBY

Radiation Free Lakeland, Milnthorpe

Relief road’s part to play

I REFER to the recent letter responding to my own of June 10 where I highlighted Highways England’s removal of the Whitehaven relief road from their Road Investment Strategy for the next 10 years and that it isn’t even in the pipeline for future investment after 2030.

My reason for highlighting this information, which was also known by Conservative councillors on the Copeland Local Committee, was to inform your readers.

The lack of a Copeland Borough Council Local Plan also affects other potential Improvements that the county would want to see happen in Copeland.

I know that the leader of Cumbria County Council wrote to the new member of the Conservative group, the elected mayor Mike Starkie, offering officer assistance in helping with the Local Plan process, but sadly this offer was not taken up.

When I last looked up the Local Plan 2017-2035 on the Copeland Borough Council website, it said this had been delayed due to the current Covid crisis.

The recently announced Green Energy Park Plan at Moorside – which also featured in the letter – will be welcomed by many if a finance model can be agreed.

Hopefully we can get the appropriate level of support and investment from the Government that wasn’t available when the NuGen Moorside project failed to materialise.

There will then be many stages and further obstacles to overcome in the potential process of developing the Green Energy Park plan including a Generic Design Assessment (GDA) – typically three years. Then the Development Consent Order in two stages – again, three years or so if all goes well.

If everything goes to plan with this site, Highways England might consider adding the Relief Road into their programme for potential investment post 2030.

FRANK MORGAN

Labour county councillor, Cleator Moor West

Links with Europe still matter

Protecting the NHS is not an end in itself. Protecting society so it functions as normally as possible is.

The lockdown gained time to get ventilators and PPE. It can not be a semi-permanent state of emergency.

To be sure, Her Majesty movingly invoked the ‘We’ll Meet Again’ spirit in her Covid speech. As a war veteran she had the right to make the point but the melody was strained by politicians. At the start of the crisis, the lack of screening capacity and ventilators made one wonder how the Battle of Britain would have worked out without sufficient Spitfires or radar sets, or how a modern war might cull the population without iodine tablets and fallout shelters.

Churchill remarked after Dunkirk that wars are not won by evacuation. He knew getting Britain out of the continent could only be the start of returning Britain back in to it.

Dunkirk reminds us that while the British can leave Europe, they are also fated to return to the continent. Virus or not, the post-Brexit trade deal and political agreement with the EU will be the most important issue confronting all of us this autumn.

The government is quiet on the issue it campaigned on in 2019 yet the locked-down liberties of Britain are as closely linked to the freedoms of Europe as they ever were.

DUGALD LAMB

Moor Row

Parking problems if St Bees garages go

The loss of garages at St Bees will be devastating for the village.

There are about 15-plus vehicle owners that use them. An additional 15 vehicles on the main street as an example will stretch from the Manor House to Seacroft Drive junction so it’s not rocket science there are going to be parking issues on the whole stretch of the main street.

There are vehicles already over spilling to park on Seacroft Drive causing issues with refuge collections.

It may get to the point if there is no parking available on the main street, residents will start parking on Fairladies estate – who won’t be at all pleased if this happens.

TERRY MONEY

By email