For many of us, 2016 seemed like a particularly tough year. It brought some major environmental setbacks, culminating in the election of a new US president with an extremely regressive environmental agenda. However, this year was not all doom and gloom for the environment…
I grew up in Devon and my father fought against the proposed new nuclear reactor at Hinkley Point in neighbouring Somerset, including attending the lengthy public inquiry in the late 1980s. Sadly, the government learnt from this experience and made sure the more recent public inquiry wasn’t allowed to talk about big issues like whether we actually need new nuclear reactors.
Nuclear is the ultimate unsustainable form of energy, leaving wastes which are dangerous for a thousand generations to come. During the first Hinkley inquiry I saw a poster stating ‘If the Romans had had nuclear reactors, we’d still be guarding the waste.’ I thought this was a great way to bring home the absurdity of nuclear. It was only later that I realised that of course the poster should really have said Cro-Magnon Man instead of the Romans, since we’ll need to be guarding that waste not for 2,000 years but for 25,000 years.
The Hunterston case was brought by Marco McGinty, a bird-watcher from Largs who visits the site on an almost daily basis. With the support from a number of NGOs, including Friends of the Earth Scotland, the local community and a solicitor called Frances McCArtney, Marco lodged a judicial review in September 2009 against the Scottish Government over the inclusion of Hunterston in the second National Planning Framework.