First Principles
Mobile homes shelve to the sea
vulnerable to the toxic crown
venting nuclear steam above the shrubbery
If thine eye offend thee . . .
The opening verse of The Trimmed Lamp, is set two or three hundred metres south east of Heysham Nuclear Power Stations, while the photo above, was taken on 21st of November 2025 from the Ocean Edge Holiday Park.
Like most Biblical quotations, Matthew 5:29 is open to interpretation, but the full verse continues “If thine eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.”
As Marianne Birkby’s recent petition makes clear, both of the clapped-out reactors at Heysham need to be shut down as quickly as possible, before particularly the residents of Lancaster, Morecambe and Heysham, pay the price. It won’t be the owners, EDF(i)– whose top management all live far away, whose decisions are likely made in Paris, who suffer. With the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales National Parks and the North Pennines all within unsafe distance of the prevailing winds at Heysham(ii), I still find it hard to believe that two such monstrosities were constructed in such a stupid place(iii). Not that there is ever a good place to build nuclear power stations. The idea of nuclear power was a hubristic madness to start with, a dreadful cul-de-sac, which rapidly wasted so much money that no doubt the technocrats felt that they had to grit their teeth and continue with it, perhaps with the Blakean notion of eventually finding wisdom if only they persisted in their folly?
Atomic Achievement, 1956(iv) celebrates the opening of Calder Hall(v) the world’s first “full-scale commercial nuclear power station”. What a first to be proud of! Honestly, watching Atomic Achievement always feels like watching toddlers play with broken glass(vi)! Just a year later came the Windscale fire(vii), Britain’s worst nuclear disaster and one of the worst in the world. Not surprisingly however, even before the fire, in early 1957, there was a radiation leak in which strontium-90 was released into the environment – another incident covered up by the British government(viii). Naturally Windscale was later whitewashed into Sellafield. While it stopped generating electricity more than 20 years ago in 2003 and no longer contributes to the national grid, Sellafield still receives the nuclear waste from the nine other UK reactors limping along producing very expensive and extremely risky electricity(ix). These include the two at Heysham. It continues to leak radioactivity and is forecast to do so into the 2050s. The site’s clean-up operations haphazardly fall short on every target(x).
Whatever one may think or feel about nuclear power, its foolhardy nature becomes immediately apparent if you study the long list of accidents and disasters(xi) associated with it. If the full cost of these was calculated, plus the cost of building, disposing of their waste (an awkwardly unsolvable problem) and dismantling them, I doubt the concept, taken globally, has ever got out of the red – and that is even before considering their vulnerability to attack. The very concept of nuclear is an anti-social corruption. Making fun-sized versions will not change this: “smaller size, same large problems”(xii).
The nuclear power issue is notorious for the volume of misinformation which surrounds it. Yet if politics has rarely been about truth, business almost never has. If there is money to be made, corporations will try to make it and the concept of SMRs (small modular reactors) has certainly been given the hard sell. Has it even fooled such once valuable environmentalists as George Monbiot? Perhaps George would be happy these days to glow in the dark!(xiii) A member of the Union of Concerned Scientists, Ed Lyman (Director, Nuclear Power Safety) despite not being against the concept of SMRs, is not convinced of their value or safety(xiv).
Image: Heysham 1 and 2 loom above Trumacar school (beyond the trees – where two of my children went for a while) a nuclear complex “unbelievably situated given that prevailing winds must blow any leaks straight across schools, housing estates and heavily populated urban areas adjoining.”(xv) (please see original article for all images)
I remain sceptical of most scientific truths, not because science doesn’t seem to realise that it is no more than the latest religion, or that most of these ‘truths’ are temporary and superficial, but because science and technology tend to be, perhaps increasingly, manipulated by politicians and economists. Contrary to what is widely believed, most of the “facts” in science are probabilities and interpretations. Truthful science is always open to revision – often reversing previous convictions . . . yet clearly it is a different type of religion to those of the past and, hijacked by politics and business, potentially an even more destructive one. Its unarguable benefits (the NHS for example) spring largely from opportunities arising from a general mood at a particular moment. The pressures eroding these minimal gains are enormous and founded in the materialist nature of our contemporary religion.
43 years ago in The Bow, (an experimental novel begun in Galgate in 1982, as Heysham 1 was nearing completion in the distance), I wrote: “Econo-politics is just a line, why must everything be seen from that line?” The ambitions of mainstream civilisation have only narrowed since.
An honest politician would tell us we can’t have a rising standard of living forever (especially without taxing billionaires and corporations). An honest politician would know that we have to find ways of distributing resources more fairly, and of being less greedy and wasteful, of thinking and living with better goals than material aspiration. Such unthinking goals are bred into us nowadays and are naturally encouraged by corporate technology – not because they care about us “seeing the world” or realising “our full potential” but merely for the sake of profit. The truth is, sooner or later, we need to manage with less power and it must be clean and sustainable, it must come from the water, the wind and the sun. This should be an inviolable first principle. But what politician or would-be leader is ever going to be bold (or suicidal) enough to grasp such a nettle?
© Lawrence Freiesleben, Heysham, March 2026
lwf@hawkvalley.co.uk
Coda (xvi)
As a coda to the nuclear mess Heysham and Morecambe are blighted by, see the Heysham Power Stations emergency plan, a pdf (xvii). With a cover not unlike a variant of the notorious Protect & Survive leaflet from the late 1970s early 1980s campaign of the same namexviii, this is filled with chilling details:
“Stable iodine tablets have been issued to occupiers of all premises within the area surrounding the power stations site.
The tablets act by “topping up” the thyroid gland with stable (nonradioactive) iodine in order to prevent it from accumulating any radioactive iodine that may be released to the environment.
If moving house please leave the stable iodine tablets in place at the property for future householders.
Additional stocks of stable iodine tablets are available to be issued following an emergency.”
I wonder how many householders still have stocks of this “stable (nonradioactive) iodine” – and whether is it issued to holidaymakers staying at Ocean Edge Caravan Park or other numerous locations within the dangerous radius of Heysham 1 and 2?
NOTES
i en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89lectricit%C3%A9_de_France Infamous for their repeated bland reassurances regarding Heysham’s well-past their use by date, that residents have “nothing to worry about”.
iii See: internationaltimes.it/in-her-kingdom-by-the-sea-part-4/
iv www.imdb.com/title/tt11925192/
v en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calder_Hall_nuclear_power_station
vi internationaltimes.it/bomb-damage-maps-a-west-london-digression/
vii en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire
viii ibid
xii www.foodandwaterwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2506_FSW_GoingNuclear.pdf
xiii Sometimes remembered as “Central Heating for Kids or the “radioactive cereal” parody, the Not the Nine O’clock News Ready Brek spoof appeared during the show’s original run, which aired on the BBC between 1979 and 1982 youtube.com/watch?v=Yt1Jd4stPFQ
xv internationaltimes.it/in-her-kingdom-by-the-sea-part-2/
xvi Taken from internationaltimes.it/in-her-kingdom-by-the-sea-part-6/ – so, although the Heysham 1 and 2 Nuclear Power Stations Emergency Plan is still available to download, it has been revised and has different page numbering and no cover image).
xvii Downloads/heysham_emergency_plan%20(1).pdf
xviii en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protect_and_Survive