Tuesday 1 March 2011

EDF job lies

interesting to watch this interview by the BBC about Flammenville in France. Watch the video and all the talk about how many jobs the Flammenville project has created for the local economy. One could be forgiven for thinking that such a project at Hinkley point may bring significant jobs to the local economy here too, you'll certainly be led to believe that if you look at the propognada on EDFs website.

However, pay a bit closer attention and there are a number of comments that are quite alarming and certainly give cause for concern with respect to jobs at the very end of the film clip the reporter states that
"The project has had setbacks, it's behind schedule & overbudget, but when it's finished in three years time, lessons learned here and some of the skilled workers involved, are expected to come to Somerset."

What was that EDF about what an amazing job creation project this is going to be? In fact the report makes clear that of the 5 thousand workers here only 1,000 are from the 'local' area (local being defined as anywhere as far away as up to one and a half hours drive). How many jobs would that translate to in the area between Minehead and Bridgwater? Not many I'm betting.

The other thing to be concerned about in this report is that when talking about training & accomodation the EDF guy says that this is the "First time for a long time that EDF have built a reactor, the decisison to plant it Flammenville was a quick one with very little time to think of it" 


Very confidence inspiring NOT!
A nuclear rush job? could this be why they have recently discovered serious design flaws in 34 of their old reactors? And this reactor (& all of its faults) would be the blueprint for a reactor built at Hinkley. Nice!

And besides even if every one of the jobs created were going to be local this still wouldn't justify the construction of more nuclear reactors, we can create Jobs any way we choose to, we just have to make the decision.

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