Celebrate the River Calder this Friday - Letter in Local Press

The following letter has been published today in the Whitehaven News and the Westmorland Gazette

Dear Editor,

Such magical creatures are the Freshwater Pearl Mussels (“Pearl mussels filter way back” by Catherine Mackinlay Westmorland Gazette August 21st). But even their magic in “filtering up to 50 litres of river water daily removing fine particles, algae and bacteria” cannot cope with the toxic burden placed upon them by the pollution pouring into two of West Cumbria’s most important rivers, the Calder and the Ehen.  

This pollution is set to escalate with the construction of new nuclear buildings on the Sellafield site .  These buildings are to facilitate transfer of wastes from one part of the site to another.  No one should begrudge Sellafield repackaging nuclear wastes more securely but this should not be at this intolerable cost with new polluted waters being discharged to the rivers at a rate of 40 cubic metres an hour ( 40,000 litres an hour ) for the next seven years.  

Thats way too much pollution for the freshwater pearl mussel and the Atlantic Salmon, upon which their life cycle relies, to cope with.  This pollution has been rubber-stamped by the Environment Agency.  There is a legal challenge which people can support on our Crowd Justice page, we need to raise £5000 in order to finance the challenge to the ongoing pollution.  

Small fry compared to the vast amounts of public money spent on protecting the freshwater pearl mussel before it reaches the elephant in the room of the polluting Sellafield site.  The legal challenge can be supported here: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/stop-contamination-of-the-rivers/  and all are welcome to join us in a walk to celebrate and apologise to the river on Friday 29th August - meet at Calderbridge Village Hall at 12 noon.  

Lakes Against Nuclear Dump (a Radiation Free Lakeland campaign)