Roy Pumfrey, Cannington resident and Stop Hinkley spokesman has a number of concerns about the new EDF Sedgemoor Campus off Bath Road.

THE opening of ‘Barcode City’, the Bath Road hostel for Hinkley C workers (‘Hinkley Campus open’, Mercury, February 26) serves yet again to highlight the multiple problems with this project.

Why is the ‘campus’ so small and so late on the scene? Rooms for 986 may sound a lot, but EDF have just announced that they want a 2,400 bed hostel at Sizewell in Suffolk.

Oh, and it is a hostel by the way, not a hotel as a recent BBC radio programme claimed. If it’s only for Hinkley workers and the public can’t get a room, it’s a hostel!

And why have we had to wait until the pressure on the local rental property market was so great before any EDF accommodation has appeared? One bedroom rents locally have risen from £380pcm 18 months ago to around £550 now. That’s a 45 per cent increase that people not working at Hinkley simply won’t have been able to afford.

EDF is forever banging on about 25,000 Hinkley C jobs. It would be more honest of them if they admitted that they mean 24,100 notices of termination, as there are just 900 permanent jobs at HPC, if and when it is ever working. The prospect of that happening gets less by the week.

The French Government is taking nuclear back under state control, which makes Hinkley an oddity, and EDF can’t get Flamanville to work, which puts the vital UK Government loan guarantees for Hinkley C in danger of disappearing.

The future fate of the Bath Road site was left hanging in your article. Let’s be in no doubt about what won’t be happening. The nature of the blunt instrument that is a Development Consent Order means the only permanent legacy Bridgwater will see is the power station and an enormous radioactive waste store, twice the size of what EDF originally proposed.

All the temporary structures – the jetty, two hostel sites, park and rides, office blocks, freight lay-downs etc etc – have to be removed.

EDF has already said its fantasy is to spirit the Bath Road units away to its improbable development at Sizewell. As for the sites, acres of tumbleweed are all we have to look forward to.

Roy Pumfrey

Cannington