How much more of this power station debacle?

Whether it’s Vales Point or Eraring power stations or the former Lake Munmorah power station, they all have in many ways impacted on our environment and statistics show impacts on our regional health.

Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Census for northern Central Coast and lower Lake Macquarie show that 16.9 per cent of each of the small scattered village populations have three or more chronic health conditions.

Cancer cluster reports commissioned by the Cancer Council have found nine cancers being prevalent in local suburbs at six per cent above the NSW average and 37 years ago three doctors from Lake Munmorah reported asthma in local school children was 30 per cent higher than in the rest of Australia.

Yet, consecutive governments and/or the industry have done little about it.

The community has been simply lied to by the industry when it comes to recycling of coal ash stored in unlined dumps and leaching into our waterways and blowing over our suburbs.

This has led to a major dilemma for our decision-makers for future planning of the region with Central Coast Council Administrator Rik Hart and/or NSW Planning Panels to either go ahead and approve up to 52,000 new homes and conservatively introduce a further 130,000 new residents into the region, or simply ignore the findings of the State Government’s Inquiry into Coal Ash dams and/or wait for the findings of the United Nations representatives after their recent visit to Chain Valley Bay.

To make things worse, Central Coast Council is approving massive new housing estates, especially at Doyalson and Crangan Bay.

Doyalson includes a childcare facility, medical centre, an over-50s village, housing estate and other commercial developments sandwiched between the Vales Point ash dam and the former Lake Munmorah ash dam, without waiting for the findings of the Inquiry’s recommendation No. 6 looking into health studies, that to date have not been completed.

Furthermore, the former Lake Munmorah power station site managers have just applied for a development application to treat contaminated water with toxic chemical PFAS.

There is nothing whatsoever but silence from our State MPs, even though they are now in the position to make substantial changes, especially considering the chairperson of the Coal Ash Inquiry is now the NSW Treasurer.

Now it looks like they want to spend up to $3B of taxpayers’ money to keep Eraring power station operating until 2027, simply adding to the health and environmental impacts whilst the population doubles.

Yet, is this the correct reason for keeping Eraring operating?

The property managers of the Waratah super battery at Lake Munmorah (GPM) have publicly stated that their power source will come from Eraring power station and possibly not from the proposed offshore wind turbines or solar projects.

This all comes about when the EPA has now announced it is prosecuting Delta Electricity (Vales Point Power Station) for the two major fish kills in Lake Macquarie in 2022.

How much more do we need to endure?

Email, Dec 12
Gary Blaschke, Lake Munmorah