Why don’t councils and the government require or encourage every power station site in the country, where there is land space to do so, to build an incinerator to help with the landfill issues and the consequential cost of disposing of waste?
Nuclear power plants, of course, have the ability to provide electricity to the national grid. The infrastructure for roads and the national grid is nearly always in place at a power station to ensure that the energy it produces can be fed straight into the system. An incinerator need only tap in to this already present infrastructure.
These locations are already zoned for such uses. They have the space for more industrial construction and the landscape has already been marred by a considerably larger building in the form of a power station. Communities won’t complain that they are losing their countryside and power companies could have the option of factoring in the incinerators in their own planning considerations and thus benefiting from the profits in the long term.
It should be encouraged, or perhaps even compulsory, for these sites to be used to their full potential and contain an incinerator to process the local waste. A well placed tax break or a Feed-in-Tariff of sorts would provide an incentive for power companies to create installations which could vastly benefit local communities in the provision of power and the disposal of waste.
Either way, the construction of incinerators in small towns up and down the country has communities in arms, despite the wider population, as shown in our article on Norfolk in this month’s newsletter, being in support of incinerators and the benefits they bring. If construction sites more suitable to their placement could be found, they could provide a valuable source of energy and a viable solution to Britain’s waste problems.