from Sunday Herald, 22 January 2012
Don’t be afraid. The sea near the Hunterston nuclear power station does glow spookily green - but it’s not because of radioactive leaks.
A local resident raised the alarm after spotting a patch of luminous green on the satellite photographs of the North Ayrshire site published online by Google Earth. There’s an equally vivid area visible just inside the site boundary.
Given the nature of the site, first thoughts were of plutonium or some other nuclear nasties contaminating the water, and endangering the health of local children.
But not so, says EDF Energy, the French company that generates electricity from the Hunterston B reactors. The green glow has a more mundane explanation: bubbling water.
The nuclear plant takes in large amounts of seawater to cool its reactors, and then discharges it back into the sea. The greenish area at sea is where the warmed water bubbles up from a pipeline, and the greenish area on the site is a shaft through which the water surges.
“The white areas on the Google Earth maps are bubbling water,” a spokeswoman for EDF Energy told the Sunday Herald. The same effect could be seen on the energy company’s own aerial photographs.
“The Google shot taken offshore is where our cooling water exits a pipe and enters the sea, producing a bubbling effect,” she said. “The other photograph is of our surge shaft, which the cooling water passes though.”
Critics agreed that the green effect was probably not caused by radioactivity, but argued that nuclear power had other drawbacks. “No matter how green the glow from Hunterston it cannot make nuclear power an environmentally sound energy source,” said Pete Roche, a nuclear consultant and former government radiation advisor.
“We still have nowhere to put the highly dangerous waste and there are continuous reports of health problems associated with radiation emissions even without any accidents like Fukushima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island.”
The story was followed up by Deadline News, the Sun, the Daily Mail and the Metro.
Comments