There is one energy-generation technology in which Scotland is right up there with the best in the world. We have universities bristling with research activity and companies eager and able to play their part in the supply chain, creating thousands of jobs.
But this is Scotland’s best-kept secret. Because the technology is not wind or wave or tidal. It is nuclear power and, as we all know, its very name is taboo. Dare not whisper it in the corridors of Holyrood’s mercifully limited power.
I saw recently a pull-together of the civil nuclear-related research work that is going on in our universities, and it is pretty impressive. Nuclear, you might say, is to Glasgow what oil&gas is to Aberdeen’s academic community.
GEC Systems is the world’s largest supplier of nuclear simulators and it has invested $3.6million to create a power-station training facility at Strathclyde University for nuclear and non-nuclear engineers.
Strathclyde is also a partner with the University of Manchester in a bid to operate the National Nuclear Laboratory. Glasgow University is working with the International Atomic Energy Authority and various national laboratories in the US in process monitoring for nuclear materials safeguards.
Then there is the British Energy Advanced Diagnostics Centre at Strathclyde, delivering all sorts of strategic research to Britain’s biggest operator of nuclear stations – now owned by EDF. And wouldn’t France love to get its hands on all that lovely research capacity.
The list goes on and on. There are at least 20 high-quality research partnerships which have made our universities a world-class resource in nuclear technologies. But academic work of this status does not exist in a vacuum.
So there are also close links between the academic effort and companies such as Clyde Pumps, Rolls-Royce, Forge Masters, Doosan Babcock and GSE Systems, all of whom are bidding to be key players in the nuclear renaissance which is now coming to the rest of Britain and, indeed, to the world.
As a firm believer in a sensible energy mix, all of this is music to my ears. What enormous potential it offers to what is left of serious manufacturing industry in Scotland. What an opportunity to train Scottish graduates to take their place in a growing international industry.
What then of Scotland’s great power companies? Spanish-owned Scottish Power and Perth-based Scottish and Southern certainly want to be part of the nuclear renaissance – so much so that they have joined forces with Gaz de France in the consortium which has acquired the site for nuclear new-build at Sellafield.
This is one of the 10 locations given the go-ahead by the UK Government for nuclear new-build. And as sure as night follows day, Sellafield will end up supplying Scotland with cheap, reliable nuclear power if we are mad enough to allow our own capacity to disappear.
This is the classic story of the doughnut with the hole in the middle. Scotland has its academic brain power and industrial capacity both pulling in the same pro-nuclear direction. We have two big-hitting power generators planning to build a new nuclear power station less than 20 miles, as the crow flies, from the Scotland-England border.
Yet, at the same time, there is a complete veto on nuclear new-build in Scotland itself. The GEC Systems simulator at Strathclyde University might lead to it equipping just about every new nuclear power station in the world. But it won’t happen in Scotland if the current devolved regime has its way. The Scottish power companies might create thousands of jobs in Cumbria, which is all for the good. But they will be forbidden from doing so at Chapelcross or Hunterston or Torness, where a lot of Scots would be very grateful for that same opportunity.
If there was any great principle involved in the SNP’s anti-nuclear stand, they would be telling the universities – which they fund – to turn away the research work that relates to this untouchable technology. They would be applying political pressure to the two big Scottish generators not to promote nuclear new-build just across the border.
But, of course, none of that is happening. The nationalists are totally silent on all the other aspects of nuclear policy while maintaining a pointless, irrational stance against Scotland obtaining the economic and energy security benefits of nuclear new-build.
It is a policy rooted in the 1970s, when civil and military nuclear capacity were being maligned as two sides of the same coin. The rest of the world has moved on and is capable of making the distinction that still eludes the Scottish Government.
Nuclear power is not, as Salmond pretends, the enemy of renewables, but is entirely complementary to them. Just ask the French, who have the lowest-carbon energy mix of any country in Europe thanks to a reliance on nuclear, topped up with hydro.
The hypocrisy of being a world-class centre of nuclear technology while placing a veto on the application of that same technology will come at a high price for Scotland. It is long past time for this debate to be brought to a more intelligent conclusion than is currently on offer.
