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Home | Friday 4th December 2009 | Issue 702

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WHEN CHIPS WERE DOWN

A Welsh Climate Camp faction turned their attention to Port Talbot this week and targeted a biomass power plant in Margam. The only one of it’s kind in the UK (although more are planned for the local area), the plant takes hourly deliveries of 20 tonnes of woodchip during working hours to keep the fires burning.

Activists locked on using bicycle locks to close off the plant’s entrance and stop the deliveries, while others climbed the chimney and unfurled a banner reading ‘Clean Energy: Dirty Joke’. The demo lasted three to four hours before a squad of police officers removed the campaigners, took their details and searched the group and their vehicles.

With Port Talbot air pollution levels already exceeding EC limits, another biomass plant in Holyhead is planned which will be the largest in the world. The two stations will require an area of managed forest plantations half the size of Wales to feed them, land that could be used to feed a third of Britain.

* See http://climatecampcymru.org/?p=932



 

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