Scottish CND is strongly opposed to the continued use of nuclear power in Scotland. Since the closure of Hunterston B in 2022, there is only one nuclear power station generating electricity, Torness. We call on the Office of Nuclear Regulation (ONR) to shut it down.
Nuclear power has deep links with nuclear weapons. The civilian nuclear power industry masquerades as the respectable face of nuclear but contributes to the infrastructure, skills and research that keep the government’s nuclear weapons programme going[i]. Reprocessed fuel from nuclear power stations becomes plutonium, an element used in nuclear weapons. The UK has a huge stockpile of weapons-grade plutonium. The pursuit of nuclear ‘fusion’, proclaimed as a new clean-energy hope, is shamefully bound up with the nuclear weapons programme of the USA and passionately pursued by scientists gathering evidence for the nuclear weapons they are designing[ii].
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.
Is Nuclear Power Hampering Development of Renewables?
Because of nuclear power, Scotland’s windfarms often have to be switched off – as the grid cannot cope with more electricity than people are using. It is unsafe to continually switch a nuclear power station on and off to match electricity demand. Scotland has reached a tipping point where almost all of our electricity can be generated from hydro-electric, wind, wave and solar sources. In fact, nuclear electricity is now an expensive disincentive to new cheaper electricity generation and is a waste of the existing capacities of the renewables. Yet the lobby for nuclear power remains very strong. We believe that the vested interests in nuclear power remain strong because a nuclear power industry is needed to prop up the nuclear weapons industry.
[i] Stirling, A., & Johnstone, P. (2018). A Global Picture of Industrial Interdependencies Between Civil and Military Nuclear Infrastructures SPRU Working Paper Series (ISSN 2057-6668). Sussex: Univerity of Sussex.
[ii] Mecklin, J. The Energy Department’s fusion breakthrough: It’s not really about generating electricity. https://thebulletin.org/2022/12/the-energy-departments-fusion-breakthrough-its-not-really-about-generating-electricity/#post-heading.
[iii] Waters, C.N., Syvitski, J.P., Gałuszka, A., Hancock, G.J., Zalasiewicz, J., Cearreta, A., et al. (2015). Can nuclear weapons fallout mark the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch? Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 71(3), 46-57; Turney, C.S., Palmer, J., Maslin, M.A., Hogg, A., Fogwill, C.J., Southon, J., et al. (2018). Global peak in atmospheric radiocarbon provides a potential definition for the onset of the Anthropocene Epoch in 1965. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 1-10.