SEVERNSIDE Together Against Nuclear Development (STAND) deserves similar support to the Forest of Dean's HOOF campaign over the selling off of forestry.

The further enlargement of the Oldbury nuclear plant will not only adversely impact on residents in the Forest, just a few miles downwind of the planned reactor complex, but also on our neighbours in Gloucester, Newport,?Bristol and beyond. In event of a nuclear accident, as in Chernobyl and Fukushima, persons even further distant will be at risk from life-threatening radioactive fall out.

To avoid overheating the three new reactors will need cooling daily by vast quantities of water which is then pumped back into the river. This poses problems of radiation risk from irradiated water, together with licensed discharges of low dose alpha radioisotopes.

Our local Member of Parliament, in a 2007 letter admitted alpha particles "are very energetic but large and therefore cannot penetrate the skin. If ingested however, alpha particles ionise particles in bodily tissue harming and destroying internal organs."

Radioactive waste of this admitted type of hazard will be discharged under licence into the Severn. Once in the river this nuclear waste is intended to be flushed down the Severn estuary and into the ocean.

That is the 'high-tech' solution to supposedly dispose of this toxic waste. In reality however, many of these radioisotopes will get trapped in river sediment and on estuary mud banks. At low tide and in drying out periods, during warmer weather, these radioactive particles will become re-suspended in the air and therefore become easily inhaled or ingested into the body.

These are scientific facts that pro-nuclear politicians and the nuclear industry will not admit for obvious reasons.

Following nuclear industry accidents such as Chernobyl and Fukushi­ma it's sheer folly to build a mammoth nuclear plant on an expanded site at Oldbury not just because of the risk from daily licenced discharges but because of the official documented past, present and future vulnerability of the proposed site to flooding. Predicted rising sea levels, tidal surges and coastal erosion are likely at some point to flood the reactors leading to meltdown, explosion and plumes of highly radioactive fallout spread to large areas similar to those at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Such accidents produce areas rendered uninhabitable for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Is this risk worth it?

For the sake of our grandchildren and future generations the evidence is overwhelming that we must cease using nuclear reactors by 2022 and, like the German government since Fukushima, look for alternative safe technologies for our energy needs.

– Dennis Hayden, Beauchamp Meadow, Lydney.