WHAT IS THIS ISSUE?

The sleekit, secretive UK Government's Scottish Secretary Alister Jack revealed he had been secretly instructing UK Ministers to draw up plans for  Nuclear Plant in Scotland. 

Scottish First Minister John Swinney revealed that there had been ZERO communication with the Scottish Government (which has devolved power over planning in Scotland) and that the UK Government had been acting in secret, saying: “This is utterly and completely incompatible with good intergovernmental working and is illustrative of the damaging behaviour, the menacing behaviour, of the Secretary of State for Scotland.”

WHY ARE YOU AGAINST IT?

1. Scotland's renewable energy future. Renewable energy is the future, in which Scotland will play a crucial part with its resources.
2. Nuclear Energy is expensive. It costs $36 to $44 per megawatt-hour for Solar energy, compared to  $112 and $189 per MWh for Nuclear Energy. Money should be spent paying workers and solving poverty instead.
3. Nuclear Energy is Dangerous. These plants would be crucial targets for terrorists, who could reach havoc. Terrorists are trying to acquire Nuclear Weapons, imagine what they could do with the freebie of Nuclear Energy Plants.
4. Nuclear Energy generates toxic waste. The Nuclear fuel cycle produces large volumes of radioactive waste and leave future generations to deal with this horror for several centuries. We have no right to impress our futile needs on our children and make them suffer o
5. Nuclear Energy has a history of failure. French EPR reactor located in Flamanville is more than 10 years overdue and nearly four times over budget. French workers have been protesting in the streets for better pay, but money is being wasted on Nuclear Energy instead.

"The narrative that nuclear power can be a “green” technology, or part of the solution to climate change involves blindness to the deep links between the climate crisis and the arrogant environmental harms of the nuclear age. The substantial contamination of a continent and an ocean caused by nuclear accidents at Chornobyl and Fukushima should be warning enough but even this scale of damage is outweighed by the global harms caused by the testing of nuclear weapons in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Humans then altered ‘background radiation’ and left a detectable layer of radioactivity around the earth[iii].  It is impossible to know which of the many human cancers since were the direct result. The harm to other species and of the carbon put into the atmosphere remain uncounted. Large areas of land around test sites remain so contaminated that they are effectively uninhabitable because of the serious dangers they pose for future generations. Nuclear industries have already contributed to climate change and widespread environmental harm and continue to put our planet at risk.

The war in Ukraine shows that nuclear power plants are a target and a terrible liability in conflict, an ever present possibility of disaster, even if not deliberately harmed. See the separate paper on this website for more information about dangers posed by Zaphorizhzhia and other nuclear power stations in Ukraine.

Even setting aside the multiple deadly connections between nuclear power, nuclear weapons, climate change and war fighting, the idea that nuclear energy is ‘clean’ and ‘low carbon’ involves forgetting about the environmental consequences before, during and after generating nuclear power. These include the toxic pollution and health risks of uranium mining, the tons of carbon-intensive specialised concrete in the plant’s construction, the routine periodic addition of radiation to the local environment during nuclear power’s operation and the troubling necessity of storing highly radioactive nuclear waste for generations after the plant has closed down.  None of these issues go away with smaller ‘modular nuclear reactors’. There is no comfort in being near a smaller uranium mine or nuclear reactor or store of highly hazardous nuclear waste rather than a larger one.

Risks from Torness: Scotland’s only operational nuclear power station, Torness, started generating electricity in 1988. Torness is already passed its original life expectancy of 35 years. It has developed cracking in the graphite core that encases its fuel rods, a problem common with ageing for this type of nuclear reactor. The risks include graphite debris falling into the channels used by control rods to shut the reactor down, potentially impeding its safe operation. Cracking may also make the reactor more vulnerable in case of earth tremors. The economic interest of its operator, the French company EDF, is to keep the ageing power stations running as long as possible. EDF has already persuaded the government inspectors from the Office of Nuclear Regulation to relax safety limits. They were allowed to keep Hunterston B operating for over 40 years until January 2022 despite a higher levels of graphite cracking than was previously regarded as acceptable. Torness, there are also recurring reports of unscheduled shutdowns due to jellyfish blocking the seawater water cooling intake pipe. As the sea warms, jelly fish become more common. Even if these risks are small, why take any risks when an accident could be catastrophic. Why take any risk of catastrophe, when there are cleaner, greener and cheaper ways of generating electricity?

Like most UK nuclear power stations, Torness is an Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor (AGR). If an AGR nuclear power station is shut down and most fuel rods removed, gas coolant is vented into the atmosphere. This might happen once a year. At that time, a spike of invisible radioactive gases is released at levels that are dangerous to people living immediately downwind, particularly to babies, children and pregnant women.  Information and data on these short-lived local spikes in radioactivity are never made publicly available as statistics are reported annually and a much shorter time scale would be needed to reveal such a spike. Independent scientists consider such radioactive emissions to be the prime cause of the leukaemia clusters observed around nuclear power plants all over the world.

Past Accidents

The UK is not immune to nuclear accidents. There is a long list, including some that were very serious, albeit not on the scale of Chornobyl and Fukushima. The International Atomic Energy Agency introduced a categorisation of the seriousness of nuclear events and accidents from 1 to 7. The accidents at Chornobyl and Fukushima were ultimately rated 7.  The most serious accident in the UK is rated 5 – much less serious than 7 but still indicating deaths from radiation and significant public exposure.

Windscale/Sellafield –

The most serious British accident we know of at the time of writing happened in October 1957 at Windscale, since renamed Sellafield, a large site with multiple nuclear facilities in Cumbria, close to the small town of Seascale. The first facilities developed there were military and included two nuclear reactors, each with a distinctive tall chimney, known as the Windscale Piles. Their function was to provide the plutonium, tritium and other nuclear elements for British nuclear bombs.  A neighbouring facility further reprocessed the nuclear fuel to completed the steps needed to produce bomb-ready plutonium.  Additionally, the site included the first nuclear reactors to contribute electricity to the British national grid, referred to as Calder Hall. Spent fuel rods from Calder Hall reactors were also reprocessed at Windscale and contributed to the production of plutonium for bombs. The accident was a fire in of one of Sellafield Piles. The graphite that surrounded the nuclear fuel rods burned for between 16 hours and three days, sending radiation across Europe. Recordings of radiation have been be used to estimates the extent of the harm but no epidemiological study was established to accurately fully measure the long-term health impact [v]. As is often the case with nuclear accidents, information was partial and government statements erred on the reassuring.  A new reprocessing facility was opened at Sellafield in 1964.  By this time the UK had a growing fleet of ‘civil’ nuclear power stations designed primarily for electricity generation but their spent fuel continued to be reprocessed at Sellafield contributing to the growing stockpile of weapons grade plutonium.  In a subsequent piece of shameless rebranding, the Windscale estate was renamed Sellafield in 1981.  The discharge of waste water from Sellafield into the Irish sea routinely include plutonium making the Irish sea the ‘most radioactive in the world’ in the 1970s and 80s, a constant matter of complaint by the Irish government.

Dounreay

In 1955 a set of new nuclear facilities began to be built at a remote site in Caithness on the north coast of Scotland, Dounreay. The idea was to build a type of nuclear reactor that would both generate electricity and create more nuclear fuel than it burned, a ‘fast breeder reactor’. The fast breeder reactors generated modest amounts of electricity and, like all nuclear reactors, significant volumes of radioactive waste which will bring harm to future generations if not well managed.  There was a serious accident at Dounreay in 1997. Rob Edwards described this in 1995 under the heading of ‘Lid Blown off Dounreay’s Lethal Secret’ as follows: “Early in the morning of Tuesday 10 May 1977 there was a loud explosion at the Dounreay nuclear plant on the north coast of Scotland. The UK Atomic Energy Authority, which runs the plant, had dumped at least 2 kilograms of sodium and potassium down a 65-metre shaft packed with radioactive waste and flooded with seawater. The results were dramatic. The sodium and potassium reacted violently with the water. The explosion blew off the shaft’s huge concrete lid, threw its steel top plate 12 metres to one side, badly damaged the 5-tonne concrete blocks at the mouth of the shaft, and blasted scaffold poles up to 40 metres away. An eyewitness reported a plume of white smoke blowing out to sea. And, as government watchdogs revealed for the first time [in June 1995], the ground around the shaft was littered with radioactive particles hot enough to injure and kill.” In 2023 dangerous radioactive particles were still being found at nearby Sandside beach.

Hunterston

There was a near very serious accident at Hunterston during the Christmas holidays of 1998 when only a skeleton staff were on duty, a severe storm with strong winds brought down the power lines linking the power station to the grid, the emergency generators that kick in to operate the cooling system also stopped working and extra staff were then desperately needed but not on site. It was sorted out in time but just needed one more twist to create enough delay for time to run out – like a fallen tree blocking the road being used by staff driving to the site to help. The possibility of a chain of events escalating into total catastrophe was frighteningly obvious."

- SCND

Give this a listen too if you have any doubts:

https://www.bing.com/videos/riverview/relatedvideo?q=why+nuclear+power+is+bad&mid=C4A79D21EC692C78AA9BC4A79D21EC692C78AA9B&FORM=VIRE

WHAT CAN WE DO?

This is the time to act. This can be done by:

• Protesting
• Signing petitions.
• Voting for Anti-Nuclear parties
• Writing letters of complaint to the Scottish & British Governments.

This is our country. Governments have no right to overrule us on our own land.

QUOTES:

“His comments and the decision to ignore the Scottish Government on building new nuclear reactors in Scotland show exactly how this Westminster government sees Scotland and its people – a nation that should get in line and know its place.” - Tommy Sheppard MP.

“This is utterly and completely incompatible with good intergovernmental working and is illustrative of the damaging behaviour, the menacing behaviour, of the Secretary of State for Scotland" - John Swinney FM, MSP.