I was born before wimpy opened the site in Llwydcoed, and from my bedroom window I could see the mountain the other side of the Rhigos mountain. Yes! when they worked the opencast it was a bit unsightly but when they finished they left the mountainside in a better condition than it was before they started. It gave work to hundreds of people, look around the Valleys, WAKE UP we need work here regardless who is making a profit. If it means work for the unemployed then why the complaining every time some sort of employment venture is mentioned in the valleys. Unemployment is rife in Wales and any employment should be made welcome. Every business has the wealthy sponsor so what's the difference who it is. If it means employment for the unemployed there's hundreds of people that would queue for the chance of a salary and not have to claim benefits. Guaranteed some one will find a green issue to stop this venture.

Gardengirl, believe me an opencast site employs very few people and with many firms who do this excavation already, then I doubt very few if any, new jobs will be created. Opencast mining is one of the most ecologically destructive mining methods in use today. To gain access to the coal, involves the excavation, removal and irreparable destruction of huge quantities of the surface eco-system and the earth below it. Local people have to endure noise, vibration and severe dust pollution. So wake up to the 21st century and lets find proper jobs for people, other than ones that wreck the environment and cause health and pollution problems. Would you be happy if they were opening another Phurnacite Plant in Aberdare just so some jobs could be created? This valley has been raped enough over the last 200 years, so lets try and leave it in a decent state for future generations.

I've already commented on this issue on another thread, but Gardengirl's comments cannot go unanswered on here. Yes, there'll always be some who will object on the green issue, and that's how it should be. There's nothing more important than that in my eyes, because it's now down to our very survival as a species.

Coal is dirty, and it's literally costing us the Earth, so we must get away from it and invest more in cleaner energy sources. If they want to erect wind farms next to me I'd have no objection, but I'm deeply concerned about the release of more CO2 into the atmosphere through coal burning. Now, as much as I want to see jobs in this area,I can't accept them at any cost. We saw all that with the phurnacite plant, and jobs or no jobs, I don't want a return to those days.

I'm sure the people of Bhopal in India were just as concerned about the jobs they were going to get from Union Carbide's plant in their town, and we all know what happened there. Let's face it, Tyrone O'Sullivan, has already shown his contempt for the people of Hirwaun and Penywaun by telling them that they are used to living in filth, so a few more years of it will not make much difference. Now that's arrogance for you.

I'm not usre on this one where I stand - I think do we want an open cast here in Cynon Valley etc.

But it will bring 250 jobs for the next 7 years and the proposal does have some long term benefits. If the landscaping and development are all part of this and conditioned that they have to be done at the end and a bond held by WAG or RCT to make sure it does I think this could be a really good project.

Its just the thought of an opencast, dirty, dusty etc, yet if you drive past the one in Merthyr you can hardly see it as most is hidden and the one for tower will be much further from the houses and roads as they plan to get to it from the mounatin road dont they?

Like I say I think there will be huge arguments for and against and whoever has to decided this will be dammed by one group or another...

My God Gardengirl, I thought us men are supposed to be the cavemen.

I always thought that men were proud to be bread winners. I don’t know what your posting really implies, as to whether I live in the dark ages or my views on creating work are sending shivers down the spine of all the protesters that cost us millions, and I mean US, be it the tax payer or the consumer finally footing the bill.

Who eventually covered the cost of the lazy slobs that held up the laying of the gas pipes? For months they sat in trees (obviously they were unemployed or they had very reasonable employers) denying progress, but eventually going home to a house with gas or electric appliances.

Every time a housing project comes to light OOOPS again there is outrage. You can live on the street but don’t spoil a little bit of land near hour home.

The mobile phone mast being erected cause a right little set too among protesters Yet I don’t know anyone who does not own a mobile.

Cardiff bay!!!! Issue !! , the wildlife (have you visited the Bay lately and seen the beauty of the place now and as for the wildlife they went on to breed elsewhere)

The wind farm issue, well let’s see the cheaper alternative would be nuclear power, how green is that.

Creating safer and larger roads to accommodate the traffic volume, Hooray time for another protest!!!!

I could go on and on about different protest issues in the last few years.

To me all this official green rubbish is a voice to say we are the bosses. Listen to us because no matter how bad the work/living situation we must have our say. Time to get the tannoy again and jump on our little boxes

Everyone of us has a bit of green I myself have my own vegetable garden/recycle in several buts/ use all the recycle facilities offered. Now retired I use my time in a way where green issue causes no problem or cost to others

When it comes to employment housing or progress then to hell with green issues.

OOH and I suppose if were in the caveman days we could hunt our food, live wherever we could build a camp fire and have no political green agenda as to where we could live, how we could live and who lived near us. WOW lets go back, where’s my hunting gear? BLISS

Thank you Gardengirl for confirming my suspected thoughts on what generation you are from. Thank goodness the younger generation are being educated on the facts of global warming.

I seriously came from the generation that introduced us to the careers officer when I left school and not the way it stands now, the introduction to the dole queue or what we now call DWP lol. On a more serious and friendly note though, where is the industry going to come from ?

The Welsh development agencies did introduce a scheme that gave factory owners concessions for three years and most of the businesses milked it by taking the freebies and closing as soon as the three year concessions ended,

Admittedly for the past several years the whole of the UK has suffered badly in the recession (and I don’t want to go into the politics of this because it’s not one party fault it’s a world recession with all parties getting a fat living regardless of economics)

I have to say though whatever employment is offered should be taken. Coal or any other mineral/ building/ industrial sites/ anything that gives us the dignity of a hard working nation once more.

Coal was once Welsh gold and our main industry. And thankfully our miners fought for an extra ten years of work in the pits. I don’t know Tyrone Powell but I do know he and others led and army of men that succeeded in the quest for work.

Going back to industry what business wants to plough money into an area that objects to anything new in the area for the sake of a tiny green belt (and I’m not talking of beauty spots) but small pieces of waste land that only serve as an excuse to stop development. Even when this recession ends the cost of the planning permission to build factories/ haulage/building sites etc , is costly enough without the added cost of waiting to get permission for the go ahead to remove of a bunch of political vandals who protest under the cover of being green.

If someone could guarantee that the pollution is the main cause of the ozone then I would be with them flying my own banner, but even some of the highest environmentalist researchers now argue that this might only be evolution as history has gone through many phases of age changes.

We need employment/housing not objections barring the way to the proud working nation we once were

I remember passing on a train a huge steel works in the Ukraine many years ago, and this works, for mile after mile, had chimneys pumping out the type of yellow smoke we used to see emanating from the phurnacite plant. Now the phurnacite plant had only four chimneys, and they were devastating in their effects on the surrounding countryside and the health of people downwind, so imagine the effect of scores of chimneys pumping out that same kind of filth.

We were told by our Russian guide that the people living around this huge steel works used to sleep at night with wet towels over their faces so as to prevent their skins burning due to the sulphur in the atmosphere. They all had jobs, mind you, but that's the price they paid for Gardengirl's "progress".

This is an extreme example, I grant you, and such a scenario will not I'm sure be played out at Tower, but it does illustrate the question that I'm asking as to what environmental degradation anyone would be prepared to accept for jobs. Of course, like the people of Abercwmboi and Mountain Ash, the people of the old Soviet Union also had no choice about what levels of filth they had to endure for their jobs.

It's still going on, by the way, all over the world. The recent oil spill in the Gulf Of Mexico is another example of extreme pollution for jobs, and as the world runs out of oil, so the risks taken by oil companies will become ever greater, and the resulting pollution ever worse.

Likewise coal; another dirty fuel whose adverse effects we are all responsible for because we demand cheap energy, and the energy companies and their shareholders demand profits. It's a vicious circle that's going to be difficult to escape from.

I support wind and wave power, but they are not capable, so far, of supplying us with what coal, gas and oil can supply us with. The remaining choice is nuclear; not so carbon dirty as coal and oil, but the storage of its waste for the next 100,000 years is its major drawback.

Now we get round to the nitty gritty of employment. How many locals will actually be employed by Tower's opencast site, or will they import cheap labour from Eastern Europe and beyond? And when the last lump is dug out, will the promise of a golden dawn of factories and energy sustainable houses be fulfilled? On past experience, I doubt it. A sprat to catch a mackerel if ever there was one.

Like it or not we need the green lobby to counter the arrogance of those who would ride roughshod all over us. Why else do you think we've got environmental laws in the first place? Do you think that the energy companies did it out of the goodness of their hearts? A reading of the history of industry in the valleys would soon squash that argument.

It's always good for a laugh to hear the anti-greens, the anti-Health & Safety, and anti-Human Rights people shouting about how progress is being held up by these restrictions. A damned good job too, otherwise we'd still be sending children down coal mines, or having them working in factories with no protection against lethal machinery, or we'd have politicians torturing and wiping out their opponents. That's the consequences of the removal of our safeguards. Much like the anti-speed camera lobby that wants the right to mow down children not aware enough to cross the road in front of a speeding drunk!

Anyway, if this does go ahead, as on past records I'm sure it will, I'll welcome the jobs because being realistic, the clean, high wage factories are not going to come here. We might as well accept that and be done with it. What we must thus ensure though is that we are not ridden over as has happened before, and that well paid jobs are forthcoming. Let's face it, on the recent sorry state of the town, we can do with them.

My other half is a security guard on an open cast which is run by walters.... He's had nothing but problems lately with protesters because they dont want walters digging and washing the coal etc.... guess it will be the same in hirwaun :)

There's absolutely nothing wrong with the Tower colliery workers making a profit. That's what they risked their money for. It's called speculate to accumulate, and is what's driven human beings since we climbed down from the trees. The Tower venture was very lucrative for them, and that's something to be applauded.

My main concern is our continuing dependency on fossil fuels like coal and oil. We're warned by over 95% of climate scientists of the possibilities of very adverse conditions for the human race if we continue on this route. Of course there are sceptics, but they are usually a minority of people with vested interests in the oil and energy industries. After all, there's none so blind as those who don't want to see.

Their opinions are having a disasterous effect already, with more and more people joining the climate change deniers. There are supposed to be clean coal processes in the pipeline, but so far they have not been proven to be viable or very effective, so remain a pipedream.

As to "any jobs in a recession"; that's too narrow a view. I've already cited cases where people were prepared to sacrifice health and environment for jobs; as we did with the scourge of the phurnacite plant. My own father worked there for over twenty years, and like so many others who also worked there, died of cancer.

Now it can't be proven that the plant was responsible for that, but an above average number of men died prematurely of various strange illnesses because of it. Hence the jobs at any cost argument carries no weight with me. That route's fraught with dangers.

Having said that, I don't expect there to be a similar scenario at Tower's opencast site. I'm sure that (rightly so) strict environmental rules will be laid down and disruption will be kept to a minimum. Also, if the Walters company is involved, then I've seen the sites that they've restored after working, and there's nothing to be concerned about on that score. They do an excellent job.

As I've said, the main problem for me is the greater environmental issue of CO2 emissions and our continuing dependency on fossil fuels. Conversely, none of us has the right to deny work to people, so long as that work is not detrimental to overall health, or damages the environment irreperably.

This question of travelling to work has always been a bane in the valleys. Cardiff is only an hour away by train, and I make that journey myself every morning as I have done for the past 21 years. To me it's not a question of "all that way down there", because it's no hassle, other than when the trains are late or cancelled, which is very rare these days.

They're damned expensive I grant you, and they charge the commuters, who they know have to travel on them, way over the odds compared to cheap day returns. But then that's the nature of "rip off" Britain for you.

People in the valleys just have to go where the jobs are, and not expect to roll out of bed and straight into work. Let's face it, apart from projects like this opencast proposal at Tower, the main reasons for the valley towns' existence, coal and steel, have long gone and there's not going to be anything to replace them.

That again is partly a fault of our geography; road and rail links are difficult, and also of course, the political will is not there either. Go to Switzerland or Austria where the mountains touch the sky and there's no problem with their road and rail links. But then they don't have short termism built into their politicial system like here, where a 100% return on investment is wanted by next week, not in five years time. They're more socially aware than the highwaymen who run our country.

Sure, we'd all like to see clean factory jobs coming here, in IT or bio-engineering etc, but it ain't going to happen, and we have to face the reality of being stuck with the old industry of mining. I'm not saying it's the right thing to do, but that's the only choice we have. Either that or move out altogether.

I'm afraid that there will be no clean factories moving into the valleys. Coal was and still is all that we've got. As I've pointed out, the political will to invest in the valleys just isn't there. We are economically unviable, and that's the truth of the matter, like it or not.

When all the old stagers do eventually die off, the only alternative for the young will be to abandon the valleys altogether and let them revert to what they once were; an area of scattered farms with the odd village or small town dotted here and there, whose residents probably work in Cardiff because that's the nearest source of employment, apart from local public services of course. It'll be a sad but real case of, "last one out switch the light off."

I've no idea how long this opencast will go on for, maybe five or seven years, but once it's finished that will be that and Cynon Valley will continue to decline.My worry about that scenario is the despair that it will engender in our young people, who perhaps have no skills because they never had the opportunity to gain any. They will then more than likely get caught up in a spiral of drugs and alcohol abuse, because the evil scumbags who peddle the stuff will deliberately target those who have no hope. And because of their lack of skills where could they move to anyway to escape it?

This is the joke about the government wanting to target those on benefits to get out and find a job. Great idea, but what jobs are they talking about? I'll bet that there's a considerable majority of people, youngsters especially, who would love to work, to train in an apprenticeship that will give them a purpose in life. But they ain't there.

If they fail to get into university, then we'll end up with the best educated dole queues we've ever had. Imagine the frustration and despair that's going to cause, as well as the bitterness that they've been abandoned with nowhere to go.

Make no mistake about it, if this government doesn't get its a**e into gear and start putting money and resources into helping these young people then we are going to end up with a lost generation. That's what happened in America during the 1930s when President Roosevelt brought in his New Deal to get America back to work after the Great Depression. We are going to need our own version of the New Deal too if we are to avert this approaching social disaster.

This opencast proposal is thus the last gasp of a defunct industry, but at least it will give work to some people, if only for a few years. A pity that Tyrone O'Sullivan had to adopt such an arrogant attitude though in telling us that you're used to living in s**t for so long that a few more years won't make much difference. Not the best approach to convince people now is it?

Let's all be honest! Who really cares about the planet? What we all want is money the more the better. The only thing people are objecting to, is that the money is not coming thier way. If they were making it, there would be no problem. Green this and wild life that, it's all crap. Rape the earth that is what it is there for, oil, coal anything that pays. After our day?? Who cares?????

Don't knock it, Cocoman is quite right; that's exactly what our politicians and their business pals think. They won't say it in public of course, but in private they'll give the corporates the nod when there's a handsome profit to be made, and to hell with the earth and all its creatures, us included.

I've seen that attitude myself right here in RCT where our councillors spout their green credentials until their developer pals want to turn a communal green area into a housing estate. Then it's jobs and keeping the economy going, and all the other excuses they give to override any opposition.

That's exactly what's going to happen at Tower as well. The coal will be extracted and thus contribute its CO2 to the already overloaded atmosphere that we breathe. They'll fly in the face of all the science and the warnings given, because it's jobs and money, and nothing else matters.

Right now they're discussing sinking oil wells into the bed of the Arctic Ocean, so this pristine area, so delicately balanced, will become another rush for profit, and possibly another environmental disaster waiting to happen.

Never mind though, as cocoman rightly said, to hell with the environment, it's all crap anyway and the earth is there for us to exploit to the utmost. That's what we human beings do; we can't see further than our noses, so the kind of world we leave for future generations is immaterial compared to satisfying our immediate needs. Let those future generations worry about it just as long as we get what we want now.

And if the Earth ends up as an uninhabitable wasteland in about a hundred years time, well, ain't that just tough on those unfortunate enough to come after us. They'll just have to manage as best they can. We've taken all the best out of the Earth, and they'll just have to scrape by on what's left, if there is anything. We had the jobs, the good life and the profits; they get the crumbs. Not for us to worry ourselves about them now is it?

After all, when the coal and iron masters ruined the environment around here two hundred years ago; cut down all the oak forests and flooded the rivers with filth, did they give a damn about us? Only now are we recovering from all that, but it'll still be a while before salmon are seen in our rivers around here, and the oaks grow again as they once did. I've heard though that otters have been sighted in Mountain Ash.

Anyway, there'll be jobs for a short while, just like up in Greenland the oil industry will breathe life into those people's lives. All short term of course, and potentially detrimental to the environment of the Arctic, but then as Cocoman says, that doesn't count for anything.

I'm afraid we disagree again dmj.

Cocoman is absolutely right, If he was'nt the world would'nt be in the mess we are in right now, History has proven that man will destroy everything in sight as long as he is making money. The Rain forests of South America are a classic example of that, They have been called the lungs of the earth but does man care that he is destroying them ? Not a Bit. There's money to be made so to hell with the earth.

We have to accept that man will eventually destroy himself as we are not yet intelligent enough to live with nature as it was intended.

The old north American Indian saying is right.

When the last bird has flown across the sky
When the last fish in the rivers have been caught
When the last tree has been cut down
Then and only then, Man will realize He can't eat MONEY.