I stood on Scotland’s last nuclear reactors and met the people keeping our lights on

UK nuclear power stations are protected by an armed police force reserved for that purpose alone.

The Civil Nuclear Constabulary’s sole mission is the security of material at stations like Torness.

These highly-trained, highly-armed operatives are out of sight and mind. Only in a crisis would that change. It’s true of the places they protect, too.

When was the last time you gave Scotland’s only working nuclear reactor site a second thought?

Torness is painted grey-blue in an effort to blend in with the waters of the North Sea behind, and in a minor concession to the landscape, there are no pylons linking Torness to the grid in the immediate vicinity. Buried cables transmit the power up the hill.

This power-generating behemoth - owned and operated by EDF since 2009 - is not invisible, but like the armed men and women who defend it, it escapes attention.

Scotsman's Joshua King and EDF's Andrea McPherson with Torness nuclear power station in the background. | EDF

Yet, across its 36-year lifetime, the nuclear fission process inside Torness’s two AGR reactors, splitting atoms and releasing the energy to superheat water and drive turbines, has produced 297 terawatt hours of electricity.

That is 297 trillion watt hours of energy. Enough to power every home in Scotland for nearly 30 years. And the plant achieved this almost a decade quicker than Hunterson B, until recently, Scotland’s other nuclear plant.

The same amount of energy created by burning gas would have generated 103,000,000 tonnes of carbon, equivalent to more than 20 years of Scottish car emissions. Those numbers demand attention.

Nuclear power isn’t entirely clean - stations like Torness are low carbon emitting but the mining of fuel material uranium is dirty, can be dangerous and uses huge volumes of water. Nor is nuclear power entirely safe.

I stood on the pile cap of the reactor at Torness, below me hundreds of fuel rods fed a reaction generating enough power for millions of homes. | EDF

I’m told air passengers are exposed to more radiation simply being closer to the sun than workers are at the station. But if nuclear stations go wrong, the dangers can be catastrophic. Chernobyl is the nightmare, and what happened at Fukushima - also a Level 7 Nuclear Event - weighs heavily on the industry.

In the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami which knocked out Fukushima’s ability to cool its reactors, contaminants spilled out and more than 100,000 people were evacuated or displaced. Halfway around the world, Germany accelerated plans to take all its plants offline.

All that, despite UN scientists concluding that there were no documented adverse health effects attributable to radiation exposure from Fukushima.

Visitors are actually welcome at Torness - there is even a guided tour. But to really go inside the guts of the plant requires a level of security trumping most airports.

Torness is perched on the East Lothian coastline, painted grey-blue to blend in with the sky and North Sea beyond | EDF

Inside the gatehouse, beyond the perimeter of armed police, I decant all electricals into a locker. The remainder of my things and I are scanned, my passport checked, and an escort is assigned to walk me to the office of station director Paul Forrest.

“At the highest level, we safely generate electricity,” Forrest says, describing his job in lay terms. Torness’s two gas-cooled, graphite-moderated reactors heat water which powers immense turbines to generate that power.

The site employs around 500 permanent staff, and 250 contractors and support staff. That’s 450 people on site under Forrest’s supervision at any given time.

“You look at our safety record here and at Hunterson, and we have not put a foot wrong in 36 years, and we’ve been producing a quarter of Scotland’s energy, depending on the time and the day.

“I think we do it quietly and with humility. We train well, we invest in careers, it’s a beautiful plant and we pride ourselves on safety. It’s a culture people take home with them.

“Torness is the most productive low carbon asset Scotland has.”

Forrest also talks about the economic impact on East Lothian and the community. During planned outages - statutory periods during which a reactor is offline - EDF brings in around 800 additional contractors. They stay in local hotels, use local services. Dunbar knows when there is an outage.

Andrea McPherson works in environmental compliance, radiological protection and dosimetry at Torness and is from the local area | EDF

But the life of the plant will soon come to an end - the station is scheduled to shut down in 2028, after which there will be several years of work to defuel and decommission.

Andrea McPherson’s family have lived in the area for generations, and she now works in environmental compliance, radiological protection and dosimetry at Torness. As we head through another layer of security, I’m fitted with an electronic personal dose meter, recording any radiation we might receive as we get closer to the reactors.

“Obviously we’re super conservative with everything, you pretty much do an investigation for anything that’s slightly off of normality, which always tends to end up having a normal explanation,” McPherson says.

“Even if you take a flight to LA, that’s essentially 0.33 millisieverts (the unit measurement for ionising radiation absorbed by the body). And that’s nothing compared to the natural dose we get per year as individuals. Not even working at a nuclear power site, you get 2.7mSv a year just from background radiation.”

The average annual radiation dose to people working at Torness? 0.023mSv.

Looking down on the pile cap, below which Torness's nuclear reaction takes place | EDF

The inside of the reactor hall is staggering in its scale. We swipe through more locked doors and enter a cavernous space several storeys high, comparable in size to an aircraft hangar or cathedral interior.

Overhead, the enormous crane used to move the hundreds of steel and ceramic fuel rods, each several metres in length, into and out of the reactor lies silent, waiting. It is a strange feeling, standing atop the pile cap with atoms colliding and splitting below my feet. The gas which cools the reaction below me reaches more than 600 degrees Celsius.

I think about the wonder of this reaction, dwarfing Scotland’s other electricity generation. And of the horror of Chernobyl and Fukushima and what can go wrong. And of the hundreds of local men and women working to keep us safe and warm and lit. It is a strange feeling, standing atop the pile cap.

“Nuclear new build is a political decision,” Forrest reflects. “I love nuclear power, I’d love Torness B out there, but we respect the Scottish Government’s position.”

We are a long way off new nuclear sites. Right now, there is not the political appetite. But whilst Torness may have escaped most people’s attention these past decades, soon a decision needs to be made - how do we replace 297 trillion watt hours of energy and keep Scotland’s lights on?