Sellafield's wind is ill for Cunningham
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Your support makes all the difference.JACK CUNNINGHAM, the famously pro-nuclear agriculture minister, has taken up arms against an energy development in his Cumbrian constituency, saying it is "massively intrusive" and needs "substantial subsidy".
But he has not, in a damascene conversion, turned against the vast, hideous Sellafield site which, with the rest of the nuclear industry, has swallowed billions of public money. He is venting his ire against a plan to build five windmills subsidised at a few pence a kilowatt hour.
He is joined by Sir Bernard Ingham's anti-wind power group, Country Guardian, whose local representative says the turbines would disfigure an "undeveloped and unspoiled" area, though they would be built on the edge of Britain's biggest radioactive waste site. Sir Bernard, group vice- president, is a paid consultant to British Nuclear Fuels, which operates both Sellafield and the dump.
The objection from Dr Cunningham - local MP for both the wind farm site and Sellafield - in a letter read to a public enquiry into the project last week, has angered both Friends of the Earth and the firm proposing the windmills. They say it appears to fly in the face of his own Government's policy to expand green energy sources. Last week energy minister John Battel promised a new, strong drive to develop renewable energy options, including wind power.
Dr Cunningham's letter declared his "emphatic opposition" to the plan to build the turbines, on 120-foot towers, at Drigg on the Cumbrian coast.
But supporters point out that the area to be taken up by the turbines is tiny compared to the massive 300-acre Drigg nuclear dump next door, which contains three quarters of a million cubic metres of radioactive waste, and to the 1,000-acre Sellafield complex, with its hundreds of buildings, which Dr Cunningham has vigorously supported.
His letter also refers to "debate about the viability of wind farms" and adds that they "can, of course, only produce small and intermittent amounts of electricity and then only with substantial subsidy".
Friends of the Earth say this seems to conflict with the Government's support for wind power as part of its policy of providing 10 per cent of Britain's electricity from renewable sources by the year 2010. It adds that the nuclear industry will receive pounds 8bn in subsidy between 1989 and 1998, and that a new study shows it will need an extra pounds 30bn of public money to manage nuclear waste and decommissioning its facilities.
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