Energy-related

horrors

of the world

John McGrath

Some 10 or so years after the Chernobyl disaster along with a bunch of other physics teachers from across Scotland I took up an offer to spend two days in the Dounreay nuclear power establishment in Caithness. The idea I suppose was to convert us, convince us, reassure us that nuclear power was no bad thing and for us to pass that opinion on to our students. They hadn't a hope with me. It was a long drive from Edinburgh and my thoughts about the dangers of what they were experimenting with grew in proportion to my realisation of the remoteness.
     The full story or a more complete story of an incident which happened in 1977 was just then coming out about how sodium metal, used as a coolant in reactors, along with other radioactive waste, had been dumped down a shaft near the sea. This inexplicably irresponsible practice resulted in an explosion – predictable even to an 'O' grade chemistry pupil. Flecks of radioactive material were spread all around and to this day that shaft remains one of the most expensive and difficult contamination clean-up operations in the EU.
     Dounreay was no longer generating electricity: the last big reactor was defunct and the facility was angling to become a reprocessing plant to be run by Nirex. In the welcome pack there was a glossy brochure about the plan Nirex already had to build a deep high-level waste repository in Cumbria. Nirex was a name known to me because my mum lived in Cumbernauld – it had said in the Cumbernauld News that they were associated with a PCB incineration plant between Cumbernauld and Falkirk which had been blamed for an increase in birth defects in farm animals.
     Also in the national press at that time it was reported that Dounreay had 'lost' some number of kilograms of enriched uranium. This turned out to be trapped in sediment in the pipes and tanks of their small reprocessing plant. When you add to this that somehow or other a team at Dounreay had been involved in assessing the viability of 'Salter's Duck', a green energy wave powered electrical generator and that they had been accused of inflating the cost of the system making it so expensive as to be not commercially viable – more expensive even than nuclear power – it was probably not the best time to assemble physics teachers for conversion.
     During a talk in which one Dounreay old timer told us that he thought a small amount of ionising radiation might actually be good for you, I felt I had to protest. Being an introverted scientist, this amounted to no more than walking out in the middle of the lecture to take myself off to the local tourist attraction – John O'Groats – a tat shop disaster zone. I left Dounreay more opposed to nuclear power than ever and wrote to my MP objecting to the reprocessing plan which thankfully came to nothing.
     Years later on another more exclusive staff development outing I went to visit a company called Renewable Energy Systems in Glasgow to find out more about wind farms. RES turned out to be part of the Sir Robert McAlpine Group – builders, not energy suppliers. RES build wind farms and sell them on as 'turn-key solutions' to investors – meaning they build them, hand them over and say goodbye, having nothing to do with what happens after that.
     I like wind farms. To me they seem elegant and optimistic but I had tried for months to find out how much energy these plants actually generated. All the promotional materials used words like 'could power a town of...' or 'capable of producing' but none ever said what they actually produced – even the top experts at GreenPeace could not tell me and nor would the staff at RES, saying it was commercially confidential information.

     I left uninformed but one thing that stuck was that during a long talk about wildlife and landscape architecture my disengaged mind drifted around the room and I saw scribbled on a whiteboard what I guessed were suggestions by staff 'brainstorming' a name for a new wind farm. Some of the suggestions looked Gaelic – but I had to ask about one long, obviously pretend, Gaelic name 'Allfornaught' a concatenation of the words All-for-naught. 'It's just a joke', my trainer told me, looking like a man who didn't think it was funny any more but it left me wondering why staff would be making jokes like that among themselves. They phoned me a few days later to cancel my planned trip to one of their wind farms on health and safety grounds.
     Last year I took the train from Inverness to Edinburgh on a Friday afternoon. It was packed and I was lucky to get what was probably the last free seat – a table seat opposite a couple of retirement age. They were from Thurso and I mentioned my trip to Dounreay. He was a retired engineer and he had worked there. When I brought up the subject of wind farms he leaned forward in a conspiratorial manner saying: 'You know when they built that one up our way they bought every petrol generator for miles around', and with a little knowing nod made it clear that he believed they were using these to fake the output. 'No!' I said. True? Who knows? Unlikely but one thing's for sure – if the power of the wind farms was greater than they claimed in their pre-construction publicity materials, we would have heard about it by now.
     When I read weeks ago that the Renewable Energy Foundation had published figures showing that in 2009 wind turbines operated only 21.9% of the time, often failing to produce any energy at all on the cold still days typical in winter, I was not surprised. The BBC reported a week later that research from the John Muir Trust 'found wind generation was below 20% of (the claimed) capacity more than half the time and below 10% of capacity over one third of the time'. A rather unfriendly environmentalist – the director of policy for Scottish Renewables – resorted to insults saying: 'It could be argued the trust is acting irresponsibly given their expertise lies in protecting our wild lands' – noticeably failing to give any concrete figures of output to refute the study.
     A Gedankenexperiment is something that you do without any apparatus. You just think and really it is all you need to do to realise that the threat of global warming or some kind of global atmospheric disaster is a real one. The composition of the earth's atmosphere is not the result of gas escaping from volcanoes or some geological chemical reaction – it has been made this way by living things. Plants and plankton have pumped oxygen into the atmosphere and removed carbon and deposited it in solid and liquid form in coal and oil.
     I do not think that you need to know the content of emails at the University of East Anglia to do the Gedankenexperiment and figure out that there will almost certainly be very serious consequences if we return all of that trapped carbon back into the atmosphere. If we do not find an alternative way to generate electricity that is exactly what we are going to do.
     Recently I had a routine of driving three days a week from Leith to Portobello and noticed on many days a coal train going from Leith docks. I assumed it was going to Cockenzie power station but the increasing frequency of the trains surprised me. It seems the coal is being stockpiled at Musselburgh and on dark winter afternoons the trucks and JCB's can be seen from Portobello beach tending the mini-mountain like a scene from WALL-E. I can only assume that someone somewhere knows the figures and has done the calculations for Scotland's future energy needs and their conclusion is to buy coal – lots of it.

     The commitment to run Scotland on 100% renewable energy by 2020 is brilliant but there are other worrying signs already. The plan to build a biomass incineration power station in Leith 400m from a residential area burning crap mixed with 70% imported wood, some of it brought thousands of miles round the world from Canada – where for some reason the Canadians cannot burn it to make electricity for themselves – seems crazy and counterintuitive when it comes to caring for the environment. There are four of these stations going up around Scotland in what seems like a desperate attempt to get away from the coal-driven future we seem to be heading for.
     Renewable energy in Canada is at 8%. Taking their renewable fuel to burn here is a false carbon economy. By doing this Scotland is indulging in a cynical bit of queue jumping – improving slightly its own renewable record but actually making things worse globally and completely ignoring the impact on the urban environment and the people of Leith. It can only be economical as a result of the same kind of carbon tax scam that delivered so many free packets of energy-saving light bulbs to my elderly mother she didn't know what to do with them and it seems quite likely to me that this loophole will be closed at a future earth summit, leaving the Leith plant to burn who knows what? If we have to do this kind of thing to hit the 100% renewable target, I would rather miss it.
     About Chernobyl the WHO report states '...4,000 deaths projected over the lifetimes of the some 600,000 persons most affected by the accident, is a small proportion of the total cancer deaths from all causes that can be expected to occur in this population'. To use Tony Blair's chilling Iraq war phrase, 4,000 people have had their 'lives cut short'. Thirty people were killed directly. In the 10 years up to 2009, 52,785 coal miners died in China. Between 30,000 and 100,000 died in the 1990 Gulf war – a war over a large oil well running under the border between two countries. All are energy-related horrors and there are plenty more.
     I took students to visit Torness nuclear power station so often I got to know the 'Welcome to Torness' video almost off by heart. In my favourite bit, a member of staff walks up to a pressure gauge and taps it with his finger – like my granddad did to the barometer. I would cue my students to look out for this scene and it usually raised a snigger, seeming so incongruous and low-tech.      Torness came on stream in 1988 but was designed about 10 years before at about the time my dad bought what turned out to be an incredibly unreliable Talbot Alpine car. I drive a 2005 bottom of the range Vauxhall Astra and even my poor man's model has four airbags, impact protection and with the exception of the times I've left my laptop plugged into the cigarette lighter for too long, it always starts and goes from A to B.
     It might not be entirely fair but there is likely to be some correlation between the safety and reliability of cars and nuclear reactors designed in the 1970s and those designed and built today. I hate nuclear power like I hate going to the dentist but I do go to the dentist and when I consider all of the above I no longer see nuclear power as the terrible thing I thought it was driving back from Dounreay. Twenty five years after Chernobyl, the brave staff at Fukushima continue to struggle to reduce the impact of their nuclear disaster but if Fukushima has caused me to think anything – aside from the awful tragedy of it all – it is that I would much rather live next to a new nuclear power station than an old one.  

John McGrath taught physics and maths for 20 years. In 2004 he set up Chalk and Talk e-learning support – an independent consultancy supporting online education and training projects