WHAT’S ON YOUR MIND?
Letter
Nuclear Waste from Dungeness
Dear HIP
I write in response to your lead story in HIP 264 New Nuclear for Dungeness? In my food business career I have had some experience of nuclear waste problems and it may help to share them here.
In 1970 I had a macrobiotic restaurant called ‘Seed’ in London near Paddington Station. Every other week, Howell’s, a department store in Cardiff, would send by rail freshly-harvested ‘laver’ seaweed which we used to replace ‘nori’, the Japanese seaweed we had previously imported from Japan for various dishes. Then the deliveries suddenly stopped and I called up Howells to find out why. “Oh, the men from the Ministry said we had to stop selling it because it was contaminated with radioactive waste from Sellafield.” That waste had accumulated on the floor of the Irish Sea, and Irish fishermen had been complaining about weird mutations in the fish they were landing. The seaweed had the same problem with ‘radionuclides’, which is the general term for the radioactive bits in nuclear power station waste-dumping that break down. Altogether there are an estimated 70,000 tonnes of radionuclide-rich nuclear waste in the seas surrounding the UK that we have dumped there in our quest for cheap energy since the 1950s. One of them, Radon-222, is the second leading cause of lung cancer.
In 1986 we were concerned about radionuclides in hazelnuts from Turkey after we saw a map of how the waste from Chernobyl was carried southwards by the wind. (My Whole Earth nut butter business used Turkish hazelnuts in our ‘3 Nut Butter,’ along with peanuts and almonds). We bought the necessary testing equipment and found that samples of hazel nuts exceeded the EU safe limit for imports of 600 becquerels per kilo. We also found that there were much higher levels on north-facing hillsides in Turkey and much lower levels on south-facing hillsides. So the levels of radionuclides were much higher on the nuts from the hills that caught the full impact of radioactive rain from Chernobyl. The simple solution was to mix the high level nuts with low level nuts to get down to the ‘safe’ limit. At that point we found another source for hazelnuts but I cannot speak for other companies who used Turkish nuts.
I still have the equipment that I used to measure radionuclides but there is now more modern, less cumbersome equipment that can do the job. At one stage I considered testing fish from Rye Bay but just decided to personally avoid bottom-dwellers like flounder and sole. Until the London Dumping Convention, which banned all sea dumping from 2006, there was no guarantee that nuclear waste would not end up in the sea and in its products. Given the long life of nuclear waste, it will be centuries before the seas see a reduction in nucleotide levels.
Before a renaissance of new nuclear at Dungeness proceeds, it might be a good idea to see how much waste is buried in Romney Marsh and what the radionuclide levels are in Rye Bay and the adjoining waters reaching into the English Channel. What’s the point of giving up smoking to avoid lung cancer if you can get it from going for a swim or having fish and chips? If the local authorities would like to borrow my equipment to measure this, they are welcome. No more nuclear until existing safety concerns are properly addressed.
Craig Sams
Letter
Hastings Commons – A Response
Dear HIP
We are writing in response to Paul McLaughlin’s article Town Deal boost for Hastings Commons in HIP 263. It quotes Philip Oakley as saying “The Observer Building has already received £5m of Town Deal money”.
We recognise and welcome scrutiny and questioning, but the facts do matter and we need to clarify these:
Hastings Commons was awarded a total of £4M, not £5M as quoted, from the Town Deal involving three buildings – Eagle House, 12 Claremont and the Observer Building. In the four years since the original submission, and the two since approval, a lot has happened.
This first development phase included the Ground Floor and Mezzanine at The Observer Building, now complete. It included developing a residential shell and services for the 2nd and 3rd floor, but did not include funding for final fit out, which is needed to make homes.
12 Claremont and Eagle House are under renovation and will be completed in spring 2025 as planned. The majority of the Towns Fund money is going into 12 Claremont, a property held by Hastings Commons Community Land Trust on a long lease from East Sussex County Council.
Twelve new homes are now being developed in the Observer Building with support from the Town Living Fund. At least eight will go to people moving out of temporary accommodation, nominated by Hastings Borough Council. The rest will be allocated to people who have a genuine need for an affordable home and are at risk of ending up in temporary accommodation. We don’t ask for wage slips or guarantors, our rents are set at 33% of median local income and capped so that they only rise with inflation. The headline states a “boost for Hastings Commons” – this is importantly a boost for affordable town centre housing in a time of acute need. Hastings Commons’ proposal was the only one on the table.
We have a FAQs page on our website which answers questions that come up, is regularly updated, and includes details about the Town Living Fund award.
We hold public Q & A events, twice-yearly events for anyone to ask questions or find out more about us. We welcome readers to come along. Further information is also on the FAQs page.
All of our work is overseen by an elected trustee board, independent audits and reported at our annual shareholder AGM. Hastings Commons CLT has over 600 shareholders from the local community in and around Hastings. Every member has a say in the continued stewardship of the Commons with the shared goal of bringing neglected buildings into working community assets. You can become a shareholder and have your say for as little as £1.
We look forward to working with our shareholders to continue the physical regeneration of buildings in a neglected area of the town centre and to providing programmes which meet under-served needs across diverse communities in Hastings.
Hastings Commons Board of Trustees
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