Labour and Conservative governments secretly harboured doubts about building a nuclear power station at Torness in East Lothian in the late 1970s, according to internal documents released by the Scottish Government.
Campaigns against Torness won support within the then Scottish Office, and came closer to success than realised. There was a “real risk” of the treasury in London delaying the project, warned one official.
But the nuclear industry fought a fierce behind-the-scenes battle in defence of the power station, and it ended up being built in the 1980s.
Campaigners condemned past decision-making about Torness as a “total sham”. According to one former UK Government adviser, lobbying by the nuclear industry had always been “more influential” than evidence.
The Ferret analysed 11 large government files on Torness in 1978 and 1979 at the National Records of Scotland in Edinburgh. One was only released in 2023 after a request under freedom of information law.
The files reveal that ministers and officials in both James Callaghan’s and Margaret Thatcher’s governments privately raised concerns about the proposed nuclear station at Torness.
Torness was the target for a series of anti-nuclear protests in the 1970s, initially organised by the Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace (SCRAM). There were demonstrations and an occupation of the site in 1978, and in May 1979 more than 10,000 people joined a weekend protest there.
Despite further protests in 1980 and 1981, the nuclear station was built and formally opened by Thatcher in 1989. It is currently scheduled to keep operating until 2028, though there are plans to run it for longer.
Early in 1978 SCRAM made a submission to the Scottish Office arguing that Torness should be subject to a new public inquiry. An earlier inquiry in 1974 had been inadequate because it had not specified the type of reactors to be built, the campaign group argued.
Unknown to SCRAM at the time, its case was backed by the senior legal advisor to the Scottish Office, the Lord Advocate, Lord Murray. He reportedly told Labour’s Scottish Secretary, Bruce Millan, that “the climate of public opinion on nuclear power has changed since 1974 to make further inquiry appropriate”.
But in a note for Millan on 14 April, a senior government official accused Murray of adopting “the main plank of the case put forward by SCRAM and its supporters.” He warned that a delay in starting to build the station would have “potentially disastrous consequences”.
Millan agreed, and in a memo on 8 May 1978, he was minuted by an official as rejecting Murray’s advice. “I do not think another inquiry is necessary or even desirable,” he said.
Three months later, when Millan was considering financial approval for Torness, he asked how much electricity was generated by all power stations in Scotland. Calculations from officials showed that existing plants could produce 63 per cent more power than needed in 1977-78, rising to a forecast 70 per cent in 1980-81.
This suggested that Torness was unnecessary. “These figures are quite horrifying,” said Millan in a message on 2 August 1978. “If it weren’t for the power plant industry requirements, I would certainly not be authorising Torness now.”
After Thatcher’s Conservative government came to power in May 1979, the incoming Scottish minister, Alex Fletcher, wanted to know why Torness was being built. A six–page memo from officials set out the case, hoping “to avoid any suggestion that Torness is ‘under review’ – a phrase which has acquired too negative a connotation”.
Case for Torness ‘less than convincing’
However, a covering note from an official on 16 May 1979 admitted that the case for Torness was “less than convincing”. The absence of information in support of the plant was “worrying”, the official commented, “because I think there is a real risk in the present climate of the treasury seeking to re-examine or hold up the project”.
In a memo two days later, Fletcher said: “I still have some doubts concerning the advisability of a nuclear station at Torness”. A handwritten note by an official added simply “Amen”.
Despite his private doubts, Fletcher told the House of Commons on 23 May 1979 there were no plans to review Torness. He omitted to add a sentence, proposed by officials, saying that “all expenditure commitments” inherited from the Labour government were “under consideration”.
But concerns about authorising finance for Torness persisted because of delays in England. The company that was meant to be building the plant, along with another at Heysham near Lancaster, was said to be in a “chaotic state”.
A memo on 1 June 1979 reported that Torness’s backer, the government-owned South of Scotland Electricity Board (SSEB), was “most despondent” about the lack of investment approval. All the signs were that the project was “slipping out of control”, it said.
In the end, though, the government documents show that the SSEB, backed by its supporters in the Scottish Office, saved Torness. They worked hard to convince the treasury and, ultimately, Thatcher, that it should go ahead because it was needed to sustain the power station industry.
Work started on the station in 1980 and it began generating electricity in 1988. Anti-nuclear campaigners at the time did not know how close Torness had been to being abandoned.
Tom Burke was director of Friends of the Earth in London from 1975 to 1979 and special advisor to UK environment ministers from 1991-97. “I am not surprised to hear that there was more scepticism about the value of Torness inside the government than became apparent at the time,” he said.
“In relation to nuclear power in general it has always been the case that political opinion rather than weight of evidence has determined the outcome. There has always been more doubt about the value of new nuclear among officials, especially the treasury, than there has been among politicians,” he added.
“In other words, effective lobbying by the nuclear industry has always been more influential than the balance of evidence on the national interest. This remains true today.”
Torness ‘a total sham’
The veteran environmental campaigner and energy author, Walt Patterson, testified at the Torness inquiry in 1974. “Torness was a total sham, and the inquiry had no relevance to the official decision to build it,” he told The Ferret.
“Torness was ordered just to keep the power station building industry busy, not because we could use the electricity.”
Pete Roche, a nuclear consultant who worked with SCRAM in Edinburgh in the 1970s and 1980s, suggested that politicians might have been worried that cancelling Torness would “somehow legitimise protest”.
He said: “We knew at the time that the case for Torness was collapsing before our very eyes, but it’s a pleasant surprise to learn that both Labour and Tory Ministers had secretly expressed doubts about the plant.”
Dr Ewan Gibbs, a researcher from the school of social and political sciences at University of Glasgow who has studied Torness protests, pointed out that anti-nuclear activists had mobilised tens of thousands of people in opposition to the plant.
“Thanks to these new research findings, we now know that both Scottish Labour and Tory ministers had serious doubts over the nuclear power station project in the late 1970s.”
Aim to run Torness until end of decade
EDF Energy, the French government company which took over running Torness nuclear power station in 2009, was not involved in the decision to build it. But it stressed the contribution it has made to Scotland’s economy and environment.
“Since 1988 Torness has produced enough zero carbon electricity to power every Scottish home for 29 years, saved more than 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere and limited the UK’s high and ongoing reliance on gas-fired power,” said an EDF spokesperson.
“The power station has also supported generations of workers in East Lothian and beyond with well-paid, highly skilled jobs. Our ambition is to generate to the end of the decade, potentially longer depending on inspections and regulatory oversight.”
Before he became a journalist, Rob Edwards was an organiser with the Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace in 1977-78. Cover image of Torness thanks to iStock/versevend.
