Nuclear Power - the flaccid UK's national virility symbol

(Published in The National, June 13, 2025.)

On June 10th Keir Starmer, the British Establishment’s latest useful idiot, announced that the UK government would ‘invest’ another £14.2bn of public money into the Sizewell C nuclear power plant white elephant whose price tag is £40 billion and counting.

Proponents will tell you that nuclear is required for “baseload” supply because renewable energy can’t be stored. But it can be stored using several technologies, some of which have been around since the 19th century. And some renewable energy sources such as tidal don’t need to be stored because they are constantly available.

Apart from being far more expensive to develop and operate than renewable energy, nuclear power’s achilles heel is that no one knows what to do with the waste. Scotland’s land and water is already contaminated with toxic radioactive waste from nuclear power plants, submarines and munitions dumps.

https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2020/03/06/scotland-the-dump-3/

So why do politicians love this flawed and dangerous technology?

One reason is because the nuclear industry funds them to promote it. Rachel Reeves has just raided £2.5bn from the £8.3bn GB Energy budget to develop Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), that are not commercially viable anywhere in the world.

Another reason is that the technology used to enrich uranium for nuclear power plants is the same technology for enriching uranium for nuclear weapons. Nuclear power is a national virility symbol to show that the flaccid and failing UK is still a ‘great power’.

Frances McKie has long campaigned against nuclear power in Scotland and has given me permission to publish this letter she sent to The Herald. She exposes the moral bankruptcy of the current Westminster regime which has chosen to ignore the 1976 Flowers Report that concluded the pursuit of nuclear power was morally wrong.

Dear Editor,

In 1976 the British Government accepted the findings of the Flowers Report, Nuclear Power and the Environment, which advised:

"It would be morally wrong to commit future generations to the consequences of fission power on a massive scale unless it has been established beyond reasonable doubt that at least one method exists for the safe isolation of these wastes for the indefinite future."

In 1987, I attended a conference in Norway where Professor Torbjorn Sikkeland, the distinguished nuclear physicist and radiation biophysicist, explained, with illustrations, that nuclear fuels and nuclear waste would never be safely or securely contained: they are simply too corrosive.

At the same conference, Professor Sikkeland also declared that it was accepted by his colleagues that hydrogen was the answer to world energy needs, but was unlikely to emerge as an option while the nuclear lobby stood in the way of necessary research and investment.

Thirty years later, radiation corrosion still plagues nuclear reactors wherever and however they are built; there is still no safe containment for the corrosive nature of nuclear waste. In 2025, however, despite the 40 year old commitment to the common sense and morality of the Flowers Report, we now have a desperate government in Westminster: economically bankrupt, at the mercy of whatever corporate lobbyists come their way.

Together, inexplicably, with the GMB, thrashing about for some sort of apparent direction, they have lurched towards another dangerous white nuclear elephant at Sizewell which, like EDF at Hinkley Point, no private enterprise will touch without massive, foolish government guarantees of unlimited funding, no matter how much overspend is required. Unquantifiable costs include decommissioning and waste disposal.

For nuclear waste, as we were warned, there is still no solution beyond digging deep holes in order to hide it - out of sight and out of irresponsible minds - for other generations to deal with. On this issue, the Flowers Report's references to morality are clearly lost on the current Westminster Labour administration.

In this way, however, their increasingly desperate shrieks, demanding that the Holyrood Government allows them to use Scotland for more nuclear reactors, missiles and nuclear waste, demonstrate very powerfully that Scotland is now firmly on a totally different political, cultural, economic, and environmental course.

Our commitment to sustainable energy production is already far better established; we export more electricity than we can use; we are working on the green hydrogen solution to storage which - were we already independent - would surely have precluded the Westminster-funded, profiteering cowboys currently playing around with potentially lethal lithium battery storage all over the Highlands.

Westminster, flailing around with post-Brexit bankruptcy, does not have a meaningful energy, environment or defence policy: it has just broadcast its latest version of panicky, ridiculous and dangerous ideas.

Scotland should have nothing to do with them, but continue with policies which by-pass more failed nuclear experiments and the production of waste that no-one, still, knows how to contain.

Frances McKie