Why don't you build on flood plains?... Because they flood. What don't you put there?... A nuclear power plant.

The flooding which is affecting so many countries so badly has come to Britain and one of the worst affected parts of Britain is Cumbria, which encompasses the Lake District, a mountainous and beautiful part of England.
Written about by the Lakeland poets, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey, the district was also loved by Beatrix Potter, the children's author and illustrator, who also farmed Herdwick sheep there and is credited with preserving much of the land which is now the Lake District National Park. According to Wikipedia, "She supported the efforts of the National Trust to preserve not just the places of extraordinary beauty but also those heads of valleys and low grazing lands that would be irreparably ruined by development."
Skip to 2015 and I have been re-reading the petition and pdf report in Radiation Free Lakeland by Marianne Birkby about the proposed nuclear plant, Moorside, in Cumbria.  This has been billed by the nuclear industry as the largest new nuclear development in Europe. There would be up to three nuclear reactors on what is currently farmland, woodland, hedgerows, marsh and shore in an area called Greenmoorside, which stretches from Sellafield to the villages of Calder Bridge, Braystones, Beckermet and down to the Irish sea.
This kind of countryside can hold substantial amount of water in the soil...Worms make straight tunnels up to the surface which allow rain water to penetrate to the deeper levels.  Certain types of soil can even hold up to twenty times their weight in water!  http://www.fao.org/docrep/009/a0100e/a0100e08.htm  and https://www.fginsight.com/news/aiming-to-increase-soil-organic-matter-content-by-20-per-cent-in-20-years-8371 This assumes, however, that they have not been built on!
As a matter of some importance,  the area planned for the Moorside development includes the floodplain for the River Ehen.
Now, according to the UK government's own live flood warnings, on December 29th the River Ehen was, at times, above the level at which flooding can occur at Braystones; on December 26th at Egremont; and on December 26th, 27th and 30th at Bridge Bleach Green Weir, at the west end of Ennerdale Water.  There may have been more occasions, but these are the ones I have in my screenshots.
I understand from the 2014 Radiation Free Lakeland report, that the plant site for each of the planned reactors would require 9.6 acres apiece and huge cooling towers perhaps another 15 acres. Maybe there would be giant cooling tunnels and heat exchange out at sea as well. How much concrete and steel and pipes would that take... and where would the flood water go, as well as the water in the soil which had been displaced by the buildings and roads and infrastructure? 
The River Ehen is a site of special scientific interest, as well as being very beautiful. The area is currently rich in its wildlife, and contains increasingly threatened species. It was supposed to have been left as a buffer zone around Sellafield, which apparently already has the largest amount of radioactivity on the planet.
Will the government listen to reason?  Well you have to understand what reason is, if you are listening to it.  According to The Guardian, Greenpeace has discovered that almost half of the areas fast tracked for new housing development by George Osborne, are on floodplains.  http://www.theguardian.com/housing-network/2015/dec/11/cumbria-george-osborne-build-homes-floods
If you live in the UK and you have time to sign the petition, as well as the one about flooding at Drigg, it would be greatly appreciated.  Sadly these aren't open to anyone outside the U.K.  But if you have got this far, thank you for reading the post and my very best wishes for the new year, which we saw in just over an hour ago to the hum of a helicopter overhead as the celebrations took place in London.

You have to be joking..... You're not!

Thanks to an article by Alan Simpson, Labour MP for Nottingham South from 1992-2010, and published recently in the Morning Star, I discovered that EDF proposes to have company volunteers who will... 'go out into the community and schools to tell the story.'
Yes, on the streets... Hundreds of them, jogging.  "Their stated objective will be to 'normalise nuclear to consumers.' " He also, in the same article, explains briefly how the nuclear power industry uses Public Relations in relation to MPs. and it's a bit of an eye opener.
Frankly, the idea of hundreds of EDF volunteers jogging round the streets trying to normalise nuclear, strikes me as quite funny.  The company volunteers going into schools, does not.
A quick Google search for the EDF website, revealed that they have been offering the "Pod", a free programme for greener schools,...  to our educational establishments and according to the Met Office figures, posted I guess some time ago, this has been ongoing since 2008 and had more than 14,300 schools involved and over 3.7 million school children involved.  If you are wondering what the Met Office has to do with EDF, well, the web page I found had it neatly subtitled, "Education >> Collaboration >>  Working with EDF Energy."
Don't get me wrong, some of the things that they do are really good and they are "collaborating" with some excellent organisations. It reminds me of Monsanto's and Bayer's funding towards "National Pollinator Week" in the USA from June 16th to 22nd. The Organic Consumers Association would  appreciate it if you would share their article http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_30250.cfm
 It also reminds me, perhaps unfairly, but then that's the way my memory works, of some research that the NIS (Nuclear Information Service) and Medact did over a two year period and made public in February. They found that over fifty British universities, that's over a third of British universities, receive funding from the Atomic Weapons Establishment, AWE. Although much of the work supported by AWE is "Blue sky" research and not aimed at any special application, some of it is considered to have"dual use" potential. This is the link: http://nuclearinfo.org/article/awe-aldermaston/atoms-peace-investigation-int-links-between-uk-universities-and-atomic
In a following short blog post, which I found very helpful, they examined  AWE's own comments, which led them to this conclusion, "AWE aren't funding research in universities for philanthropic purposes: they're doing it because they think the results will be of use to Britain's nuclear weapons programme."
This means, the way I see it,  that even if you think you are going to be doing research purely for the good of humanity, there could be a horrible twist to it.  You can find out which universities are involved from the article and I shall be blogging about this again later!

Meanwhile back at EDF and their company volunteers, who, I gather, will be taking  "Talk Service " into schools:
"The concept is simple. Use the best advocates – our people – to talk to colleges, schools and other organisations in the communities where we work. The aim is to create open and honest dialogue and to help people understand more about the industry."
 Really? Well, if that's the case, perhaps it would be only fair, and in accordance with a balanced education, if the schools invited someone from CND or Greenpeace, or the local groups campaigning against new nuclear power plants or nuclear waste, to come along and give their views at the same time. Not, by the way, a troll in anti-nuclear clothing, but a genuine, clear thinking, moral activist.
Are children in Britain today taught to think for themselves, or is it "Don't rock the boat, we have to keep the sponsors happy." ?
Happily, across the Irish Sea, which is apparently the most radioactively polluted in the world, there are school students who seem to be very aware of the problems.  I don't think that EDF would cut any ice with the then 14 to 17 year olds who made "Nuclear Winter" an animated film which was given a special recognition award at the recent International Uranium Film Festival in Rio de Janeiro. 
"A ship dumps its cargo of nuclear waste in the Artic, stirring something strange up from the depths".
Wow! http://www.pureproject.ie/what-we-do/pure-animation-movies/ (Scroll down a few films to find it... but worth the trip.)