Campaigners remember the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe

Rochdale campaigners remember the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe

Rochdale and Littleborough Peace Group marked the 27th anniversary of the nuclear catastrophe at Chernobyl on Friday (26 April 2013) by calling on their local MPs to support the decommissioning of all existing nuclear power stations and an end to plans to build new nuclear plants. They displayed poster and distributed leaflets reminding shoppers that 'we are all downwind of a nuclear power station'.

On behalf of the peace group, Pat Sanchez said: “The explosion and fire at Chernobyl released vast quantities of radioactive particles which spread all over Europe, including the United Kingdom and Rochdale, but Chernobyl is only one of many disasters which have threatened all our futures.

"Like Chernobyl, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima Daiichi in March 2011 was also classified by the International Nuclear Event Scale as a highly dangerous level 7 event.

"In Rochdale, we are very vulnerable to the existing nuclear power stations at Heysham and at Sellafield where there have been successions of accidents, fires and closures which threaten our safety.

"Nuclear power is dangerous, expensive, unnecessary, damaging to health and closely linked to nuclear weapons proliferation. An accident or terrorist attack at a nuclear power station could leave large parts of Britain uninhabitable for hundreds of years, but even without an accident, routine releases from nuclear plants lead to rises in childhood leukaemia.

"New nuclear plants would create vast amounts of nuclear waste for which there is no agreed safe storage solution.”