Oldbury closes at last

On Wednesday Oldbury nuclear plant closed after 44 years of operating - at last - many of us have long argued it should have closed many years ago. It will take 100 years to clean up and indeed is a very tough job....for many hundred years after that it will still need to be kept secure.

It is estimated the cost of taking Oldbury out of action and clearing the site will be £954 million....of course we rarely believe figures from the nuclear industry...indeed can they find any large project that has stayed on cost and on time....Hinkley Point has already slipped 2 years and now we hear that the Office for Nuclear Regulation is delaying its safety approval. In Finland and France, the predecessors of EDF’s planned reactor, are years behind schedule and vastly over budget. The report of the first independent, authoritative inquiry into Fukushima – published this week in Japanese – only increases our concerns.

Local anti-nuke campaigner Reg Illingworth has been invited to speak at E.on shareholder conference in front of 5,000 people and the boards.  He spoke at the RWE AGM in 2011 where RWE shareholder agreed to pull out of investment of the technology in Germany.

Geoffrey Lean writes in the Telegraph (worth a look at whole article): :"This week the world’s longest-running nuclear power station ran out of steam. At 11am on Wednesday, the appropriately named Oldbury in Gloucestershire – once a location for a Doctor Who storyline – was switched off after 44 years, as part of a wider shutdown that will cut Britain’s 10 atomic plants to just one in little more than a decade. That same morning, just down the Severn Estuary, protesters were evicted from a deserted farmhouse on the site of the first of the new reactors designed to replace them."