Neil McEvoy AM demands answers from the board of NRW over nuclear mud

Neil McEvoy has written to the board of NRW to demand answers about the safety of mud that is to be dredged from outside Hinkley Nuclear Reactor and then dumped in Welsh waters.

Thousands of campaigners have signed a petition against the plans with other Assembly Members now joining the calls for the licence to dump the mud to be suspended.

Mr McEvoy first brought the mud dump to the world’s attention when he challenged the Labour Environment Secretary over the licence in September 2017. Since then over 100,000 people have signed petitions calling for more testing.

A petition to the National Assembly for Wales received enough signatures to force a plenary debate, where Neil McEvoy accused the Environment Secretary of letting Wales take England’s potentially nuclear mud, without getting anything in return.

However, Natural Resources Wales, the Environment watchdog in Wales, has refused to suspend the dumping licence. The mud was meant to start being dumped on 16 August, but it was later reported that the mud dump would be delayed until at least September.

Neil McEvoy is now demanding the licence itself is suspended and has called on the board of Natural Resources Wales to utilise the Precautionary Principle, as detailed in Article 191 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union.

Neil McEvoy AM said:

“I’m concerned because I do not believe enough testing has been done.

“We’re talking about mud being dredged from outside a nuclear reactor and NRW are relying on shallow tests using only one type of spectrometry. When potentially nuclear mud was tested in Kosovo they used 3 methods of gamma spectrometry, beta spectrometry and plasma mass spectrometry and yet the mud from outside Hinkley was tested using only one of these methods. Why was that good enough for Kosovo but not good enough for Wales?

“If anything is lurking in this mud it is going to be deep down. But hardly any deep testing has been done and even then it was almost ten years ago, with the raw data now missing.

“We need to use the Precautionary Principle, as detailed in Article 191 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, and urgently suspend the licence until proper and thorough testing has been done. I just do not believe it has been proven that this mud is safe beyond doubt.”