Kick Nuclear Activists Return to Leaflet DECC and The Treasury.

On morning of May 14th Kick Nuclear activists leafleted the
civil servants and government advisers who work at DECC [the
Department of Energy & Climate Change] about the high cost
of new build.

On the morning of May 15th leaflets were handed out to the civil
servants and government advisers who work in the Treasury.

Both the Secretary of State at DECC ( Ed Davey ),
and the Chief Secretary to the Treasury ( Danny Alexander )
were seen to be reading the leaflets,
as were many of those who work in these two government
departments.

Here is a copy of the leaflet: -

Hold the Line, Treasury

We stand here again in solidarity with The Treasury, to support it in its
principled stand against wasting tax-payers money on a dangerous,
expensive new nuclear power station near Bristol, at Hinckley Point.
After 60 years the nuclear industry still seems incapable of building
nuclear power stations without riding on subsidies from the government,
and this one has previously promised no subsidies yet stands on the
edge of underwriting the whole project and committing us all to paying
double the current wholesale price of electricity for the next 40 years.
Only the plucky little Treasury stands in the way of this enormous error,
so we stand here today to back it.

The debate over costs is over. Renewables won. Warren Buffet, the
highly respected US investor, has just announced that his company,
Berkshire Hathaway, is to build a 579 MW solar power farm in the US,
selling the electricity produced to Southern California Edison on a long
term contract. The numbers he produced last week were that nuclear
needed a capital expenditure of $6 W, against $4 W for solar, and
production costs of $22 MWh against $0 MWh for solar. No contest, in
his and our opinion. In the UK, on-shore wind today costs £80 MWh
against £100 MWh needed by EDF to build Hinkley Point. (Remember
EDF talked of costs of £40 MWh when they first proposed Hinckley
Point 8 years ago?) And wind produces no waste to be guarded for
thousands of years on a geologically active, constantly shifting planet,
and doesn't destroy your country if it has a bad day and melts down, as
has happened with nuclear on average once every 12 years. The few
Tories who resist on-shore wind developments on the sole grounds that
they would spoil the view have not convinced us that a nuclear power
plant and accompanying waste dumps blend more harmoniously into the
landscape if the nuke might take the entire countryside with it for 300
years in the event of a mishap or a terrorist incident. Ask north-east
Japan or the Ukraine. Why take such a risk if the risk-less alternatives
are cheaper, and are welcomed by most of the population? Just so a
few French bureaucrats can have an upward career path and buy a few
more expensive shirts? And don't tell me French technology can't go
wrong, after flight AF447 smacked into the Atlantic killing all on board 3
years ago after its elite pilots held the nose 15 degrees above the
horizon, holding the stick back, as the stalled new Airbus dropped at
10,000 feet per minute for 3 minutes. They'd been told that an Airbus
cannot be stalled. Wrong... 'What's going on, I don't understand' said the
pilot in control...

And North Korea doesnt really need a nuclear missile if a conventional
one would have the same effect on any of japan's 52 nuclear power
stations. A well-aimed shoulder-launched missile would do.

So come on, Treasury; hold out for financial sanity. Most of the nation is
with you, and would rather we used our massive wind and wave potential
than buy shoddy, over-priced risk machines that span off from our
desire to build nuclear weapons back in the 50s. Even the head of GE
said last month in an interview with the FT 'Nuclear Power is really hard
to justify financially. And at some point, economics rule'. Indeed. And the
nuclear industry starts with bad economics and goes downhill from
there.