Environmental fears over planned Charvil oil site
A planned distribution site for diesel and heating oil on the edge of a country park has been branded an "environmental disaster" waiting to happen.Speedy Fuels has made an application to store and distribute fuel from a former MOT testing station on Old Bath Road in Charvil, Berkshire.Critics said they feared leakages from the site could devastate local fishing lakes and the River Loddon, a tributary of the nearby River Thames.But company director Matt Greensmith said there were "multiple fail safes" to stop oil entering local water courses.
Speedy Fuels began using the site late last year, but was told its operation was not covered by existing planning permission.The firm was ordered to shut it down and then made a fresh application.
Andy Church, the fishery manger for Charvil Fishing Society, said he was worried fuel could end up entering the lake as a result of worsening floods."There's a huge risk of flooding into the site and the resultant environmental disaster that could happen," he said."If there was to be a spill or a leak it could be catastrophe for the lake, for the stock, for our fishing society and for the country park as a whole."Parish councillor for Charvil, Lee Cripps, agreed, saying that during the winter, the lake levels were so high the site was "an island surrounded by water".
But Mr Greensmith said all container tanks were bunded and checked regularly."It can't go wrong," he said."I get it - people think an oil company is a dirty company... but I don't believe our neighbours will know we're there."He said an expert assessment had found there was "no flood risk" to the site.
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Telegraph
11 minutes ago
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‘It's absolutely f---ed': Why Google's new £1bn London office is in crisis
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Heatherwick, 55, has a habit of designing ingenious objects and places that are later found to be impractical, from a sculpture to commemorate Manchester hosting the 2002 Commonwealth Games to a New York visitor attraction later called a 'suicide machine' and London's Routemaster buses to Boris Johnson's abandoned Garden Bridge in the capital. The $2 trillion technology giant launched its quest for a London headquarters in 2013, when it commissioned a more typical office block from architects AHMM; by 2015, those plans had been binned as they were apparently 'too boring' for the tastes of co-founder Larry Page. Enter Heatherwick, who can be described as almost anything except 'boring'. He turned the concept of a giant office building (almost literally) on its head, and designed a long structure parallel to King's Cross railway platforms that is longer (330m/1,083ft) than The Shard is tall (310m/1,106ft). 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Conran became Heatherwick's mentor and famously described him as 'the Leonardo da Vinci of our times'. He has had his fair share of successes, most notably when he designed the Olympic cauldron for the 2012 London Games. It consisted of 204 copper cones, one for each participating nation, attached to long stems that wowed people the world over when they came together to create one larger vessel. Heatherwick, who was awarded a CBE in 2013, was also the driving force behind Coal Drops Yard, a stone's throw from Google's King's Cross building, that is a thriving hub of shops and restaurants after decades as a derelict wasteland. But for every Heatherwick triumph, there has been a misstep. His sculpture for the Commonwealth Games – named B of the Bang – was a cluster of metal spikes coming from the top of a column to imitate an explosion, but it was completed late and over budget. 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The Guardian
37 minutes ago
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The climate crisis requires scaling all feasible solutions as fast as possible, but, with limited capital, we should prioritise those that make economic sense HillMBA student, Cambridge Judge Business School As Nils Pratley says, Great British Energy's budget has been nuked to divert funding away from local energy initiatives (11 June). But let's get away from the idea that SMRs are a cutting-edge technology. Rolls-Royce is proposing a 470MW reactor, the same size as the first-generation Magnox reactors. Their 'small' modular reactor, if it ever emerges, will use the familiar method of generating a lot of heat in a very complex and expensive manner, in order to boil water and turn a turbine. It will bequeath yet more radioactive waste to add to the burden and risk at Sellafield. In the meantime, if government SMR funding continues, it takes money away from opportunities for cutting-edge technical and social innovation, discovery and training all around the country, as schools, hospitals, community groups, network operators and all of us get to grips with renewables-based systems. This sort of innovation is necessary, it's already benefiting us and it needs full-on government support rather than uneasy compromises with an increasingly redundant nuclear DarbyEmerita research fellow, Environmental Change Institute I'm a Scot who moved to the US in 1982. I returned to the UK seven years ago. In my time in the US, I worked with a few contractors as a chemist and health and safety manager on a number of environmental clean-up projects, chemical, biological and nuclear. The nuclear clean-up sites I worked on directly and indirectly were Hanford in Washington state, and Rocky Flats, Colorado. The multibillion-dollar Hanford cleanup is ongoing. Most of the problems there are as a result of gross mismanagement of nuclear waste during the cold war. I very much believe in wind, solar and other environmental solutions to energy production. I am cautiously supportive of small‑scale nuclear energy, but outraged by this government's failure to include the costs of the disposal of past, current and future nuclear waste in its support of 'cheap energy'. Has Ed Miliband taken into account future waste management issues? Google Hanford cleanup to see the real expense. Can we trust this and any future government to protect the environment, public health and the taxpayer from future nuclear 'cost overruns'?Peter HolmyardEdinburgh The more I read about the government's nuclear intentions, the more it sounds like HS2 all over again, ie another financial boondoggle. Where are the detailed costings? What is our experience with cost overruns, eg at Hinkley Point C? What is the overseas experience with pressurised water reactors (the kind proposed for Sizewell C) at Olkiluoto, at Flamanville, at Taishan? Uniformly bad in all cases, actually. No matter which way you look at this, viz the future cost overruns, the facts that we consumers will be on the hook for them, that reactors are never constructed on time, that nuclear wastes are unaudited, that we have to import all our uranium, that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stated in 2023 that renewables are 10 times better than nuclear at lowering carbon emissions, all point to a remarkably poor decision by the government, sad to Ian FairlieIndependent consultant on radioactivity in the environment; vice-president, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
