Why Does This Stuff Matter To Me?

This first post in this new blog aims to explain why I've decided to augment my longstanding, and mostly research and fact-based, Beyond 60 web site with something more personal and discursive, and which is not embarrassed to admit that I'm starting from the position that I believe my 'home' is about to be spoiled, and I don't like it. More about 'home' later.

Now in July 2025, approaching 2 years since the November 2023 announcement that a huge solar farm was to be built, the impact on my 'home' of what was renamed the Great North Road Solar & Biodiversity Park (GNRSBP) for the Statutory Consultation stage of its development appears to have receded, see GNR SP with the whole 'south eastern quadrant' solar panel areas being removed by Elements Green from the CDO application they made to The Planning Inspectorate. So, for now at least, my walks across Muskham Vale are safe 😊.

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I ended up spending enormous amounts of time just trying to - initially via the SolarComment Google Group, and later specialising in map-based information items, to help kickstart local awareness and engagement with what the proposal would mean for us, especially across the area between North Muskham & Bathley. 

So, this blog got little attention, with just a couple of inline EDITS like the ones below, and an occasional self-standing post where my career background interests impelled me to write something. Henceforth, I intend to follow the 'This Stuff' scope I set initially for the blog with a wider frame of reference, starting with my most recent post.

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EDIT 21st February 2024, 14 weeks since this first post and now that I've put a link leading here from Great North Road Solar Park (GNRSP) to offer personal thoughts on the web page's content, my driver is "Don't get mad, be objective, know the facts, challenge the misinformation", so please read my later posts as well to put this initial emotional rant in context. It's still genuine, but I've calmed down ..

I don't know how to create an index of this blog, so I've added a few EDITS like the one above into this home page to provide pointers to places where I've developed some of the references I've made here.

The proposed development is - by any measure - a major development proposal in our back yard. I use the phrase deliberately, and I defy anyone to tell me they wouldn't ask probing questions if it was their own back yard about to be dumped on. 

In this blog I aim to explore "who benefits most from this proposal" ..... all energy proposals and decisions involve technical, environmental, financial & sociopolitical aspects .. and the Great North Road Solar Park (GNRSP) certainly does.

My view of the risks around projects like GNRSP was already forming back in the 1970s when I worked for the Institute of Geological Sciences, on a survey mapping gravel resources in the Thames Valley. I soon realised "the government", the landowners, the tenant farmers, and the unsuspecting local residents all had quite different attitudes to the probability that my drill rigs were helping to find the country's next generation of gravel pits. The parallels, here in 2023, are obvious.

In this picture from 1982, my final group of Blackpool College Environmental Science & Energy Resources students and I are at Windscale in Sellafield, at a time the public were against building nuclear, and coal was still King. Back in college we would have already covered solar and wind energy, practical work to assess our homes' insulation, and discussed Thatcher's policies on coal mining and her "rapid depletion" decision on North Sea oil & gas, as well as noting the growing level of atmospheric CO2.

EDIT 22nd February 2024, on the day of this visit in 1982, the UK still had an ambitious programme to capitalise on its pioneering civil nuclear industry, by building (and exporting) a number of AGR (Advanced Gas Reactors), the big mid-term target was to build commercial scale "breeder reactors" ... and we were expecting the tokamak development work at Culham to be part of the realisation of controlled nuclear fusion "within a decade or so" ... 4 decades later we are still waiting for controlled nuclear fusion, and the UK civil nuclear programme is struggling .. it's far from clear whether the Small Modular reactor potential will be realised ... nuclear build timescales are too slow to meet current energy supply threats. I'd love to think that the STEP Fusion Energy development that the UKAEA plans to undertake at the West Burton site will produce our long term energy solution, but ...

These young students were way ahead of the curve on these energy & environment issues, things that were on hardly anyone's agenda at the time. I've sometimes wondered what will have stuck with them in later life ... who knows, perhaps some of them - wherever they are - are now doing exactly the same thing that I aim to do here.

In 1983 my family and I moved to North Muskham when I came to manage the Engineering & Science department at what was then Newark Technical College. The department's main groups of students at that time were the young men who, no doubt having taken good advice from their school careers teachers to 'get a trade', were CEGB electrical and/or mechanical apprentices from the 2000MW coal-fired power stations all along the Trent. As a geologist I'd been down pits up in Lancashire of course, and I accompanied the CEGB lads down Nottinghamshire pits when they went to see where their home power stations' coal came from. In the CEGB, as in this contemporary National Coal Board advert, this was seen as a 'job for life'. It's all pretty much disappeared, just German-owned Staythorpe gas-fired power station left. Some jobs there, but most are lost. So, I've seen our nuclear industry neglected, and our mining industry destroyed, as a result of what I see as wrong-headed political decisions - short term, strategic failure - now compounded by the desperate commitments made by recent governments, not least by Boris Johnson, grandstanding at COP26. 

And now, in pursuit of a net-zero policy which is (whatever one's views on the nature of climate change are) very unlikely to have any significant influence on global climate change, we are being asked (perhaps told?) to go along with this. 

Those who just drive by on the A1 may wonder what the fuss is about, for me - minimal carbon footprint Johnny Walker, boots on the ground across these fields several days a week - it means for a substantial part of my walk I'll be walking alongside acres of aluminosilicate instead of crops - though, with 2.5m fences everywhere, I may not even see that! So, the next time there's a COVID-style flood of locals out in the countryside, using their Muskham Vale 'back yard' to keep healthy and sane, it will be a very different experience! 

Locked in for 40 years with compromised access to our countryside, North Muskham presently the 'home' of 3 generations of my family. There, I've said 'home' again, why? Well, it's worth noting that in practically every parish affected by this proposal there is a characteristic population structure, exemplified by that in North Muskham, in which 35-40% are 60+, and around 15% (including me) are 75+. We've made our homes here and, for the most part, have little option or desire to go anywhere else - so, even if the nation's net zero policy forces us to embrace this "Nationally Significant Infrastructure Project", we've every right to fight for the fullest possible mitigation of its damaging implementation effects.

I've been working my way through the 205-page developers' EIA Scoping Report document, looking carefully at the detail of what is proposed. You can see, in real-time, where I've got to so far in preparing my input to our Parish Council's request for parishioners' views by 30th November 2023. I've set up a walk on 26th November and invited parishioners to look at what impact GNSRP would have on the ground. 

Over the next months and years we're likely to face a juggernaut of technical & financial pressure to go along with our areas being fundamentally changed in character - my gut tells me we owe it to ourselves and our (grand)children to make sure the proposals are challenged, and the 'benefits' evaluated in a balanced way.