An open letter to RWE npower - on January 2 a little girl called Olivia Mann, aged nine, went to the RWE npower headquarters to deliver her own petition containing nearly 200 signatures from her school friends. It was a request to your company not to fill the large lake at Radley with ash from Didcot Power Station because she loves the wildlife there so much.

For 20 months, local people of Radley and Abingdon have exhausted themselves fighting against your proposals to destroy a beautiful and wildlife-rich part of our landscape - to no avail!

Our protests have fallen on deaf ears, but will this little girl melt your hearts where we have failed?

The saddest thing about your proposals is that they are completely unnecessary. There is a perfectly acceptable solution to your waste disposal problem sitting on your doorstep - the Sutton Courtenay Landfill Site. This site, that already receives 100,000 tonnes of your ash a year, has recently discovered an additional 4.6 million cu metres of space - nine times the extra capacity afforded by our own lake!

You say that you need a 24/7 facility for disposing of your ash that only the Radley Lakes can provide and yet you've not explained why pumping ash to the Radley Lakes is a 24/7 facility while pumping to Sutton Courtenay is not.

You tell us that you will restore the area. How you can replace a beautiful lake by a five-metre high ash tip and, with a straight face, talk of restoration'?

I would ask you, please, to think again. The benefit you would derive from doing the right thing by local people and the environment would far outweigh the relatively small extra cost of using the Sutton Courtenay site.

M WHITE Abingdon, Oxon