Ten environmental activists were arrested during a protest at a power station, police said last night. Those arrested were part of a group which broke into Didcot Power Station in Oxfordshire at about 5 a.m. yesterday as part of a climate change demonstration.
Nine people who climbed to the top of the emissions chimney at the station are preparing to stay there overnight and say they may not leave for "weeks".
A Thames Valley Police spokesman said of the protesters who scaled the chimney: "We have been negotiating with these protesters but at present they cannot be physically moved due to their location and safety issues.
"A police presence will remain on the site until the protest is over.
"We continue to liaise with the site authorities to resolve the situation to a peaceful conclusion."
Trying to starve the power station of fuel, the environmental campaigners scaled its 200-metre high chimney in protest against coal fired plants, while operator RWE npower switched to burning gas at the flexible plant for the time being.
German utility E.ON's plan to build a new coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth in Kent was the focus of environmental protests in Britain until the project was frozen in early October.
"Since E.ON shelved their plans to build a new coal plant at Kingsnorth this month, we realised npower is the new frontline," Amy Johnson, one of the protesters, said in a statement.
"We're going to stay here until they say they'll stop building new coal plants. We know that might take a while but we're patient."
RWE plans to build coal fired plants in Germany and is looking at building "cleaner coal" plants in England.
The protesters said in a statement yesterday morning they had shut the plant down. But data from National Grid shows three of the four units at the 2,000-megawatt plant were running yesterday afternoon, while another was already on a planned outage when the protest began.
Built as a coal-fired plant, three of Didcot's four generating units have been converted to burn natural gas or coal because of changing market and environmental conditions.
Although the protest did not succeed in shutting Didcot, it should briefly cut the power plant's emissions because burning gas emits much less climate-warming carbon than coal.
"They are all running on gas," the spokesman said of the three operational units, adding if needed more coal could be fed into Didcot without using the conveyor.
RWE npower said the company had stopped the conveyor belt that feeds coal into the plant for safety reasons while the protesters were near the belt, adding there were already piles of coal inside the plant before the stoppage.
One of the units tripped early yesterday, due to a technical issue unrelated to the protest, but was restarted around midday.