I THOROUGHLY endorse the letter last week hoping for more cycle paths across the Dengie, but fear your correspondent has swallowed whole the professional myth-making publicity from the Chinese-led Bradwell B conglomerate.

Waste disposal is still hardly clever – Bradwell A has become a regional depository for radioactive waste on a low-lying site at risk from flooding, with no national depository yet, despite previous promises. Nuclear energy is very far from being clean, holistically speaking.

The tens of thousands of jobs she fondly imagines will be filled by local youngsters will be a bow wave of construction work for a limited period, requiring a majority to come from elsewhere, possibly even favouring outside the UK.

This influx will overwhelm rather than support local communities.

The permanent jobs will be few in number and hardly justify the disturbance while it is built, or permanent damage to the marine environment, wildlife and night sky thereafter during its 60-year or longer lifetime.

Nuclear is not a flexible way of providing electricity, and will prevent more efficient use of British-led renewable energy by the time it is built. You don’t have to destroy the environment in this particular way to become carbon neutral.

Like all of us, she has not yet been given true information on the scale of the project. The acreage of land swallowed in concrete, the hundreds of thousands of truckloads on our narrow roads creating dust and disturbance etc.

In Maldon we’re currently experiencing the far lesser inconvenience on the roads from the housing development surrounding the town, which is nothing compared to what Bradwell B will produce all the way from the A12 to the tip of the Dengie. The two massive pipes (think Tube tunnel size) for the necessary chemically treated cooling outflow will also damage and heat the estuary water or the protected waters beyond.

This is a massive project favouring big business interests and not the community, however well the Bradwell B cause is presented.

We might be offered a few crumbs but at what cost, in every sense – including the financial cost to each of us with the ridiculously high tariff for the eventual energy provided which is enshrined in the casual and wholly political deal which was struck by former Chancellor Osborne. The true economic case for this station has never been made.

We and our children will suffer for this project, be in no doubt.

Judy Lea

Spital Road, Maldon