A group of supporters from Forest based STAND (Severnside Together Against Nuclear Development) claim that our railways and the towns and cities they pass through are at risk from trains carrying highly radioactive nuclear fuel.
They staged a protest and leafleted outside Gloucester railway station on Friday, there saying that Nuclear Trains carrying highly radioactive fuel from Hinkley Nuclear Power Station to Sellafield go through Gloucestershire every week.
Barbara French, secretary of the group, said “The situation is bad enough now, but it is very worrying to think that when the new Nuclear Power stations at Hinkley and Oldbury are completed there will be a train nearly every day on our railways carrying high level nuclear waste. As well as this, trains are carrying Intermediate level waste from five nuclear power stations to to be stored at Berkeley in South Gloucestershire, about a mile across the river from Lydney in the Forest of Dean. This too is set to increase. This makes for a huge amount of toxic waste travelling around Gloucestershire and the Severn estuary at any one time, putting our population at risk.”
Dennis Hayden, a Lydney resident and nuclear test veteran said it was alarming to hear that highly radioactive waste is transported along our railways every day.
He said, “If there was an accident, or possibly an attack by terrorists, the results could be catastrophic. Radiation released would seriously damage the health of all those living hundreds of miles around, as well as those servicemen who would have to try to clear up the mess. And it is not impossible there could be such an event. The nuclear industry itself admits that the transport of waste is the most vulnerable part of the nuclear cycle regarding terrorist attack. And there have already been three accidents at unmanned level crossings in the UK. Luckily these were all empty flasks returning from Sellafield to Nuclear Power Stations. But we all know serious accidents DO occur sometimes.