Peter Jones: Nuclear plant leaves positive fall-out

Dounreay, for many Scots who have never been near the place, is one of the most loathed names in Scotland. Its history embodies all that’s feared to be wrong about nuclear energy – explosions, accidents and radioactive waste contaminating land and sea.

The curious thing is that when you do go there and talk to the people who live close by the landmark white dome of the experimental reactor, they don’t quite see it that way. Indeed, Alex Salmond, who has made a career out of campaigning against nuclear energy, has cause to be grateful to Dounreay. If it had never existed, his hopes of turning Scotland into the Saudi Arabia of renewable energy would be a lot harder to realise.

Befitting a county which helped pioneer Britain’s nuclear age with the establishment of the experimental fast-breeder nuclear reactor there in 1955, Caithness is now at the frontier of another new energy source – the power of waves and tides in the surging Pentland Firth. And harnessing that needs the expertise which Dounreay has bequeathed Caithness.

That’s not all. First, back in the 1950s, the local MP campaigned endlessly for the reactor to be sited in Caithness, reckoning that it was needed to halt a cycle of emigration and decline. Dounreay succeeded in that, tripling the population of nearby Thurso to 9,000.

Second, Dounreay has created a strong local education ethic. The scientists and technicians who migrated to Thurso were highly educated people. A new secondary school was built in Thurso to school their children. Because of their parental aspirations, for a while Thurso High School (it is said, though I could not pin down the facts) boasted the highest proportion of school leavers going on to university of any state school in Scotland.

The Atomic Energy Authority (AEA) helped to finance Thurso College, partly out of self-interest it is true, because much of the further education carried out there produced skilled apprentices who went on to work at Dounreay. Oddly enough, despite the fact that Dounreay is branded as part of the unsafe nuclear industry despised by campaigners against it, the Dounreay workforce today includes the third generation of the same local families.

Third, Dounreay helped to pioneer distance or tele-working. While the mostly male workforce worked happily at the reactor, their wives had little to do. In an inspired move, AEA put its pension administration centre in Thurso, providing work for some of them. It is still there, taken over by Babcock, and employing about 40 people.

The example encouraged BT when it was experimenting with distance working in the early 1990s, to set up a directory service call centre in Thurso, initially employing 30 people. It was a success. BT’s call centre there now employs about 300 people.

Fourth, the expertise built up at Dounreay created spin-out companies. One of them, AEA Battery Systems, produced lithium ion batteries that have powered systems on Mars orbiter satellites. Now known as ABSL and owned by EnerSys, a major international manufacturer of stored energy systems for industrial systems, the 70 workers at the Caithness factory are Britain’s only workforce producing large volumes of lithium ion batteries for customers as varied as the makers of bomb disposal equipment and Nasa.

Fifth, Dounreay has required a lot of engineering work over the years, which has created local companies which are as skilled as, and in some cases more skilled than, any company in Britain, because engineering on a nuclear site has to be of the highest precision.

One I met, Will Campbell of JGC Engineering, can even out-engineer the Germans. His company, which employs 120 people, is based in a vast metal shed outside Thurso. It is what a blacksmithing business started by his great-great-great- grandfather has grown into.

Inside, there is something unexpected – a deep hole at the bottom of which is a mock-up of a nuclear reactor. Mr Campbell is using it to construct and programme a computer-controlled crane for a German company. It will use it to extract nuclear fuel rods from a Lithuanian nuclear power station it is de-commissioning.

Skills like these will be essential if the promised boom in wave and tidal energy present in the Pentland Firth between Thurso and Orkney arrives. About £6 billion is expected to be spent by big utilities between now and 2020 installing hundreds of wave machines and tidal turbines. The huge weight of these machines means that expertise close to where they are installed is essential, not just for their installation but also for their operation and maintenance.

Local engineering firms are already winning work. Numax, just outside Thurso, was commissioned by a German firm to build a £200,000+ component for a marine energy device it is testing off Orkney and completed the job ahead of schedule.

Moreover, it saved German embarrassment by re-machining an ill-fitting German component inside 24 hours. Numax has big ambitions, having recently bought a company in Cheshire (and moving it to Caithness) which specialises in making things out of carbon composites, a material which is fast replacing metal in products as varied as cars and golf clubs.

The county’s education ethic and marine energy prospects neatly combine at the University of the Highlands and Islands Environmental Research Institute in Thurso. There, staff and students are not only at the frontier of research into the relatively poorly-understood workings of marine ecosystems, but are also mapping the flows of the Pentland Firth, producing knowledge which will be vital to companies looking to site their turbines there. It is perfectly true that Dounreay has left some legacies which are nothing to be proud of. Radioactive particles swilling about on the seabed and occasionally washing ashore means there are a few beaches nearby over which some have safety doubts.

But there is another legacy which is altogether much more praiseworthy, and which is rarely mentioned. Does it outweigh the bad things? My impression from talking to local people is most of them, at least, think it does.

It is also the case that marine energy looks to be coming along at precisely the right time. The workforce at Dounreay, which peaked at about 3,000 in the late 1980s, is now down to about 1,900 and will fall to nil by about 2035. Caithness has reason to be grateful to Mr Salmond’s drive to promote marine energy. But Mr Salmond also has reason to thank Dounreay.