On Wednesday 6 February 2013, Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group discussed the growing crisis surrounding nuclear power and nuclear waste in the United Kingdom and especially in North West England. They called for the decommissioning of all existing nuclear power stations and the immediate scrapping of plans to build any more.
Philip Gilligan said: "The government plans to build more nuclear power stations, when the existing ones are already polluting our planet and deforming our children.
"Those promoting nuclear power don't want us to know the dangerous truth. They tell us that nuclear power is "safe", but as the disasters at Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima have all shown us, this is not the case. They tell us that nuclear power is "clean”, but the nuclear industry produces dirty radioactive waste that remains dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years.
"Now MPs on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) have told us that the 'enormous' legacy of nuclear waste at Sellafield has been allowed to build up, with no indication of when the cost will stop rising.
"The PAC said that Sellafield already costs the public around £1.6 billion per year and its chairwoman, Margaret Hodge MP says that a solution to the problem of long-term storage of nuclear waste is as far away as ever following the decision by leaders of Cumbria County Council to reject plans for an underground dump in the Lake District.
"Successive governments have failed to find any solution to the thousands of tons of nuclear waste that has been allowed to build up on the notoriously accident-prone sites around the often renamed nuclear power sites in Cumbria, while the current government’s plans to build more nuclear power stations will produce more nuclear waste.
"This hazardous and very long-lasting material is taken by train from places like Sizewell in the South East of England up the west coast mainline to be dumped 'temporarily' above ground at Sellafield. It is time to stop this dangerous and expensive madness.”
