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The Bransty Tunnel through which nuclear waste trundles a few times a week 1km beneath Whitehaven Town Centre. image is a still taken from Network Rail film
Trudy Harrison MP and wannabe MP Josh MacAlister have joined forces under the banner of "Britain Remade". Their dream of building a nuclear prefab "faster" and "cheaper" next to the worlds biggest stockpile of plutonium is within our grasp they breathlessly tell us. "There could be new nuclear power in Cumbria, delivering jobs for the region, and clean energy for the whole country".
Hot and dangerous Nuclear wastes from their "clean energy" trundles through the Bransty Rail Tunnel under the town of Whitehaven EVERY week enroute to the Sellafield site already bursting at the seams with radioactive crapola. The Bransty Rail Tunnel has served Network Rail and the nuclear industry well. It is a fine piece of old Victorian engineering which extends for a full 1km directly under homes and businesses in Whitehaven. Only recently it has become unstable. Network Rail are rather worried about the impacts of reactivated old mine water water bubbling up into the tunnel and even putting pressure on the sides of the tunnel (as we can see from Network Rail's own video taken recently).
Rather than gushing about building untried untested nuclear prefabs (euphemistically called "Small Modular Reactors" actually pretty large at half the size of Calder Hall reactors), the MP and wannabe MP should be putting EVERY EFFORT into protecting the safety of the folk of Whitehaven by CLOSING THIS TUNNEL certainly to Nuclear Waste Transports and possibly to passenger and other freight trains. Ceasing nuclear waste production in Scotland and the North wouldn't make a huge difference to electricity as nuclear's contribution to the UKs electrcity capacity has been minimal according to National Grid with wind producing many times more capacity in the recent cold weather.
The most urgent question for Whitehaven is:
Why is heavily polluted mine water is still gushing into the nuclear waste route of the Bransty Tunnel over one year on and into Queens Dock, Whitehaven and what are Trudy Harrison MP and Josh MacAlister wannabe MP doing to address this?
Another equally urgent and topical question given the Post Office scandal is:
Are the MP and prospective MP happy that all nuclear waste consignments including those travelling a few times a week through the Bransty Tunnel are monitored and tracked by the same company, Fujitsu, responsible for the Post Office scandal. Fujitsu's "Accountancy and Tracking Of Material" ATOM was contracted by the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in 2001. "Fujitsu chose a combination of Microsoft and Oracle systems with web portal technology to make this possible, i.e. to successfully design and implement a package to process, update and report on nuclear and radioactive materials throughout the supply chain." As Dik Third of UKAEA says, “We believe that there is no other system in the world capable of dealing with such complexity and breadth of plant operations and regulatory accounting requirements.” Does Whitehaven feel lucky? Britain is being Remade into what? A Nuclear Sacrifice Zone?
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The press have been told about Fujitsu handling all the UK's inventory of nuclear waste - but they have so far failed to expose this to the public all basically saying "its concerning" but they need "specifics" - yep like the same company responsible for the Post Office scandal is responsible for tracking and accounting for all the UKs nuclear waste isn't specific enough!