Environmentalists protest at Australian coal plant

SYDNEY (Reuters) - Environmental activists chained themselves to a conveyor belt at one of Australia's largest coal-fired electricity plants Saturday to protest slow government action on climate change, a spokeswoman said.

Four protesters from the group Rising Tide, three men and one woman, carried out the action at the Bayswater plant north of Sydney, Rising Tide spokeswoman Georgina Woods told Reuters.

Police were at the scene and had detained approximately 25 other protesters, Woods said, adding that electricity generation had also been disrupted.

"They have chained themselves with piping. They have locked themselves there," she told Reuters. "They cannot be removed. The police will have to cut them off."

Run by Macquarie Generation, the Bayswater plant is one of Australia's largest coal-fired plants. Located near Muswellbrook in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales state, it generates approximately 17,000 GWhs of electricity a year and is one of the state's main sources of electricity.

Rising Tide says the plant produced 14 million tons of carbon dioxide in the year to June 2007 and is Australia's biggest single source of greenhouse gas emissions.

The group said its protest was prompted by an upcoming UN climate change conference in Poland, which Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is expected to attend. One of Rudd's first actions after his election last year was to commit Australia to ratifying the Kyoto protocol on climate change, leaving the United States as the only major country not to have done so.

Spokesmen for Macquarie Generation and the New South Wales state police could not immediately be contacted for comment.