This situation calls into question the mindset of the Beauly-Denny rent-a-rabble protest.
In October 2008 we published an analysis of the state of the UK’s nuclear power network and it wasn’t good news.
Even then it was clear that overall capacity was seriously compromised by failures in reinvestment and maintenance. The private view in the industry at that time was that the UK would be lucky to get through that winter without power shortages.
Read the article, its detail and then consider our current situation.
On top of the the picture obtaining in October 2008, we now have Reactor One at Torness shut down last week and out of commission for weeks to come.
This has happened as we face the forecast warning of yet another prolonged cold spell, bringing intensified demand for power to heat homes. A spokesman for the National Grid has admitted that, following the Torness reactor shutdown, power shortages cannot be ruled out.
We got away with it in the winter of 2008-2009. In the circumstances today we may not be so lucky.
This is where the Beauly-Denny power line protestors need to behave with a more comprehensive understanding of their wider social responsibilities.
Thanks to the Labour administrations of Blair and Brown, seducing financial institutions into the most ill-found excesses of gambling, the UK is more than broke. Oddly, the fact that we are broke beyond imagining makes it easier to ignore just how bad the situation is.
There is no money to underground sections of the Beauly-Denny line – and if there was, is this what we should be spending it on just now?
(This is not even to mention the fact that undergrounding is more environmentally damaging than pylons. Moreover, at great cost both to the environment and to the public purse, while it may produce a more acceptable aesthetic for the rural romantics and fashionistas, it also causes secondary environmental damage when repairs are required.)
Yet the Ramblers Association is joining forces with the other vested-interest objectors, together planning to make the Beauly-Denny line upgrading a nationwide issue in the General Election.
Foolishly, they do not see that their own narrow self-interest is replicated across the country and will defeat their grand intent.
In the present circumstances, it is inconceivable that candidates and voters in England, Wales and Northern Ireland will care a jot about an existing line of pylons in Scotland being raised a little higher than at present – while being significantly streamlined at the same time.
The protest will make no impact on the UK nationwide campaign or results – but it will cost volumes of public money in Scotland in public inquiries. We simply cannot afford this.
Yet those who have the money to keep warm and to go on walking holidays will carelessly force the Scottish Government to waste serious money on hearing their largely selfish whinging, while those at the far end of our society struggle and fail to combat fuel poverty.
No other Scottish Government would – could – do anything other than what is currently proposed; nor would any UK Government be able to justify diverting additional funds to Scotland to allow some undergrounding on this line.
This protest is no more than a pointless, blinkered, irresponsible, ill-informed, ill-timed and damagingly expensive indulgence.
The UK is literally winging it from day to day on whether the national power supply holds up. We got into this position by failures in competent analysis, strategy and investment.
Ironically, in October 2008 we published our analysis of the UK’s power supply infrastructure on the day that Scotland’s First Minister launched the Scottish Renewable Energy Framework. The contrast in strategic thinking and forward planning could not have been sharper.
The Torness incident
For information, it has emerged that around 4.00pm last Monday (1st February) Reactor One at Torness ‘tripped’ and its owners, the French company EDF, has confirmed that the reactor has since been offline.
Local residents living nearby heard alarm bells ringing for around 90 minutes at the time – which must have been an unnerving experience.
SEPA was informed of the failure and told that it was caused by a fault in a generator transformer.
No one was injured but while both EDF and SEPA say that there were ‘no radiological aspects associated with this event’ and that ‘there has been no significant environmental impact’, it is hard to have absolute confidence in this.
It has been admitted that some of the oil – amount unspecified – from the transformer escaped at the time. Two parallel statements addressing the consequences of this fact carry internal contradictions.
- systems to prevent contamination of local seawater are said to have ‘worked well’.
- an inspection of the area ‘had found no visible (our italics) leaked oil at the site’.
Surely, with a incident that saw what one local resident described as: ‘a lot of smoke billowing out of the main building’, an inspection of the relevant area after the event should have been a lot more rigorous than ‘visual’?
The photograph at the top, of Torness Nuclear Power Station in East Lothian, is cropped from an original by copyright holder Asterion and is reproduced here under the Creative Commons licence.
