Joan Girling has been fighting the nuclear industry most of her adult life. She was at school when the new Magnox reactor was begun on the Suffolk coast at Sizewell in the 1960s. Her father told her it was a “necessary evil”. But when she moved to Leiston, just a few miles from the nuclear power station, and work began on Sizewell B in the 1980s, she could no longer ignore it. “The traffic and the noise was so bad… I had to move house to the other side of Leiston. I had three children. I couldn’t let them be exposed to that,” she said. Then in 1989 the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) proposed a Sizewell C and Joan decided she had to do something. In the next few weeks the plans will go to the Planning Inspectorate and then on to Secretary of State. If it is approved Joan expects ten years or more of construction, millions of tonnes of aggregate roaring in by road or rail, spoil heaps and a campus of more than 6,000 workers, on what she calls “my beloved coast. Look at the pictures of Hinkley Point in Somerset. Look at that mess. I don’t want that here,” she says
BBC 7th July 2019 read more »