Lessons from the last nuclear power plant in Scotland

The boxy metal shell surrounding Torness nuclear power station is painted to blend in with the surrounding sky. Bowing to the dour weather of Scotland’s coast, the designers picked a tepid grey-blue. Construction began in the early Thatcher years and power started flowing in 1988. That still makes it the second-newest (after Sizewell B in Suffolk) of Britain’s working nuclear sites.

Torness is also a parable for the failings and folly of Britain’s approach to energy. When the plant was built, the plan was to run it for 25 years; it has now been going for 37 years. The power that Torness generates—enough to supply over 2% of Britain’s electricity—proved too vital, in a grid hungry for stable baseload power and in a country that had forgotten how to build nuclear reactors at a reasonable cost.

So Torness pushes on. EDF, the French utility that now runs it, plans to keep it going until at least 2030. Paul Forrest, the station’s day-to-day boss, reckons a few years past that might be manageable. In the meantime, a green refuelling machine inserts steel rods full of uranium pellets into the two reactors and extracts spent ones—which are then sent on a dedicated train across the border to Sellafield, in Cumbria.

Thousands of graphite bricks make up those reactors. This graphite moderator slows down the neutrons the uranium fuel spits out, raising the odds that atoms are split and energy produced. But it is slowly cracking under the burden of radiation and cannot be replaced.

Too many fractures and the plant could become vulnerable to an earthquake. Torness will keep running only so long as its operators, and the regulators, are persuaded that it will withstand a one-in-10,000-year quake. Making that call means computer simulations, cameras to monitor the cracks and, occasionally, putting a scale model on a “shaker table” in Bristol.

Usually, the site of a decommissioned nuclear reactor would be an ideal place to build a new one. Locals are used to the industry, and often employed by it. The geography is favourable: near a ready supply of cooling water in the ocean and with links to the electricity grid. Recent British governments have been a smidge keener on nuclear power. Two new plants are planned in England, Hinkley Point C and Sizewell C, both next door to 1960s-era reactors.

Most Scots, and even a majority of Scottish National Party (SNP) voters, support new nuclear power, according to polling by Britain Remade, an advocacy group. But the SNP has used its sway over Scotland’s planning system to, in effect, ban new nuclear projects.

Unless the SNP has a change of heart, or blows its polling lead and loses next year’s Scottish elections, no new nuclear power will come to Torness. The site’s owners are still mulling how to use the surrounding land once the station itself gets passed to the state for decommissioning. Maybe a data centre, speculates Mr Forrest. Whatever gets built, the power will have to come from elsewhere.■