Nuclear families living in the shadow of Torness

A dog-walker scuttles by, two longhaired dachshunds drawing eager figures-of-eight around her as she stops to chat. She lives at Oldhamstocks, a few miles inland, and she regularly brings the dogs down here. Doesn't she mind having the power station's squat, monolithic, sinisterpresenceasthebackdroptohermorning constitutionals? "Not really," she answers breezily. "It's got to be somewhere. You just get used to it."

Joe, a beachcomber who has holidayed locally for 20 years, describes the area as "heaven on Earth". It will, he adds, take more than a nuclear power station to spoil the view.

Such indifference would have been hard to imagine 29 years ago, when thousands of demonstrators gathered at the Torness site after permission had been granted for the construction of a 1250 megawatt advanced gas-cooled reactor there. It was the first large-scale protest against nuclear generation in the UK, as opposed to nuclear weaponry, and it was to ignite a new age of wider nuclear dissent. The seeds of the actions that subsequently flourished at Greenham Common and Faslane were sown on this spur of land, a few miles south of Dunbar.

Do they still lie dormant there? On the day of publication of the white paper that reaffirms the Westminster government's faith in a nuclear future, does the fissile material of protest still lurk within the fuel rods of the East Lothian psyche? Scotland's first minister Alex Salmond and his SNP-led Executive have opposed the building of any new nuclear power stations in Scotland, a position shared by 72 of Holyrood's 129 MSPs, but what are the thoughts of those who have lived with a reactor in their backyards for the best part of the two decades that have passed since Torness first simmered into life in 1988?

Has familiarity bred contentment with this mighty lump of cubist sculpture that sits on its North Sea headland midway between Edinburgh and Berwick Upon Tweed? Contentment might be an exaggeration as far as Donald McKinney is concerned, but when an individual describinghimselfasa"Celticspiritualistauthor" confesses to being sanguine about the presence of such a totemic structure as Torness, then you know that the battle lines of the debate have not been drawn quite where you expected them.

"But you've got to understand that I grew up in Thurso," laughs McKinney. "Anywhere is acceptable after living next door to Dounreay." Surely, though, just the sight of Torness - situated a few miles from Spott village, where he now lives - arouses an emotional response in him, if only for what it symbolises? "No, not really," he replies. "I'm probably typical of a lot of people around here in that I'm just not too bothered by it being there. It's been there long enough, so it's not as if we could do anything about it now anyway. I think there's also a general acceptance that it has a good safety record, and that it doesn't seem to do much harm to the immediate environment. The big problem is what to do with the waste, and that's a problem for everyone, not just those of us who live near the site."

Back at the beach, Margaret Carlyon is standing outside the laundry block of Thorntonloch caravan site. She has been comingherefor41yearsandisnot remotely bothered that, for almost half that time, a fully operational nuclear power station has been pumping out around a quarter of the electricity consumed in Scotland just a few hundred yards away.

Tiny of frame, but strong of opinion, Carlyon led the fight to keep the caravan site open when the construction of Torness first began. "The council wanted to close the place down," she says, bristling with indignation after all these years. "I think their thought was that you can't have a caravan park next to a nuclear power plant, so we would have to go. But they weren't shutting down the farms, so why should we just leave? We got a petition going, and we won."

The site has room for a few touring caravans, but most of the residents occupy stationary units: neatly-tended, flower-bordered, comfortably bedded into the landscape. Carlyon, whose late husband Charlie was the first person to undergo a heart transplant operation in Scotland, chairs the committee that runs the park.

"We're on good terms with them," she says of her neighbours at the Torness plant. "When the station was first built there was a kind of foam that sat on the sea out there, but they came down and took readings and there was apparently nothing wrong. Really, we've not had any bother at all.

"OK, it's not the prettiest thing, but we've just got used to it. We thought it would decimate the landscape visually, and I suppose it does to a certain degree, but it's not really all that ugly a building. Look at the cement works just down the road: that's abysmal. Or even Cockenzie power station just up the coast. Torness is no worse then those things."

The favourable contrast with the cement works - a ramshackle and jaw-droppingly hideous collection of girders, hoppers and smokestacks just south of Dunbar - is made repeatedly. And then, of course, there is the nearby landfill site, one of the largest in the country, where seagulls whirl as a phalanx of bulldozers commits Edinburgh's waste to the grave. "It's as if everything horrible has been shoved into one wee corner," McKinney says.

WITHareactor taking shape up the road,theterm "boom town" was probably not too popular during the 1980s: unquestionably a time of plenty in Dunbar. Nationally, unemployment was soaring past three million, but the building of Torness power station brought jobs and cash flooding into the town. Sunny Dunny - the place receives more hours of direct sunshine per annum than anywhere else in Scotland - became Money Dunny, a frontier town of hard working, hard drinking, and hard times ahead.

"There was a huge workforce around the town back then, and a lot of people made a lot of money," remembers Will Collin, a teacher at Dunbar Grammar School when building began, headmaster by the time it finished. "But it really wasn't good for the town as a whole. The place became a construction town. The hotels disintegrated. It wasn't very pleasant."

Recovery has been slow. In the past few years, Dunbar's population has grown rapidly on the strength of its fast transport links into Edinburgh, but it still lacks the conspicuous prosperity of Haddington, Gifford, or the Golf Stream settlements of Aberlady, Gullane and North Berwick. The high street shops (The Crunchy Carrot, Rockin Rolls) signal that money is being spent elsewhere.

Collin, now retired, offers the perspective of a background in science, nuclear physics being his speciality. "All along I felt there wouldn't be a problem with the site, so long as they got the safety aspects right," he explains. "I had spent umpteen hours working with radioactive isotopes in the research labs at Edinburgh University, so I didn't have any hang-ups there. The only issue in my mind was whether they would get all the safety in order."

It was a global concern at the time. The China Syndrome, the Jane Fonda thriller about the near-meltdown of a California reactor, had just been released, closely followed by the real-life disaster of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. In April 1986, the Chernobyl catastrophe confirmed the worst fears of those who believed that nuclear power was simply too dangerous to be harnessed for civil applications. In its militaryguise,theatomicArmageddon seemed to creep ever closer as cold war tensions rose.

None of which seemed to produce even the slightest fluttering of the mental needles of the Dunbar citizenry's personal Geiger counters. "There was a lot of opposition from afar, but very little locally," Collin says. "There were protests at the site, marches along the high street, but it wasn't the locals who were doing it. Dunbar is a fairly small-c-conservative kind of place, and there just weren't many nuclear disarmers in the town.

"I think there was even a degree of resentment towards the demonstrators after a while. A lot of locals were earning their living at the site, and they began to find the protesters a bit wearing. Let's face it, there was never any chance that they would actually halt the construction of the thing.

"In any case, the opposition to nuclear power at the time was very much linked to the nuclear weapons issue. But the two things are completely different. Someone once described the connection between nuclearexplosivesandnuclearpower stationsasbeingliketheconnection between dynamite and Mars Bars: they're both energy stores, but there's quite a difference in the way they release their energy."

Collin is a leading figure in Dunbar's John Muir Association, which commemorates the life of the local man who became the father of modern environmentalism. It seems paradoxical to be enthused both by the founder of the conservation movement and the science of nuclear fission, but Collin sees no contradiction. In the era of globalwarming,hesays,nuclearhas become the cleaner, greener option.

"Muir said the universe is interconnected, everything has a bearing on everything else. You can't consider nuclear power in isolation any more, because if we don't have it then what are the alternatives? You start running out of options. Faced with CO2 and other emissions from coal and oil burning, I have to say it has to be nuclear."

For followers of The Simpsons, Brian Cowell's office is a crashing disappointment. Unlike Montgomery Burns, his counterpart at the Springfield Nuclear Plant, the Torness station director's quarters have none of the more interesting accoutrements of despotism. No television monitors to spy on the workers. No secret trapdoor. No catapult to fire weights across the room. No ceiling-mounted suction tube that can whisk troublesome employees off to Morocco.

And yet, however bright and airy the room, however friendly the welcome, it is plain these are not the headquarters of the Happy Biscuit Company. The view through the tall, plate-glass windows takes in the gate-house, with its steel turnstiles, and the double-bank of high fencing that encircles the site - topped with razor wire, bristling with CCTV cameras, and patrolled regularly by armed officers of the Civic Nuclear Constabulary.

"We must be secure from any terrorist incursion into the site," Cowell explains. "Protesters are a different issue, as people have a right to protest and that has to be respected. The responses are always appropriate." He doesn't actually say it, but the implication is that suicide bombers can probably expect a good riddling with lead, while tree-huggers might feel their civil rights have been infringed if they're not offered cups of tea during their demonstration.

Cowell, 46, has been in the power industry for 30 years - a generation of generating, you could say. He began his career in coal stations, moving to nuclear in the 1980s. He worked on the commissioning of Torness, but spent most of his time at Hunterston, on the Ayrshire coast. Married with three children, he moved back to East Lothian to take the top job last October.

In the nuclear business, jokes about glowing died of old age a long time ago, so let's just say Cowell exudes enthusiasm for his job. But you sense, too, a simmering frustration with the fact that an industry that is now more than 50 years old should still be viewed with suspicion. Yet the transformation of matter at its most fundamental level is the essence of the alchemist's trade, and not even the most ambitious of the mediaeval practitioners threatened the kind of cataclysmic consequences that nuclear, if only theoretically, could bring.

Environmental campaigners, Friends of the Earth, Scotland, are less than sanguine about the UK government's plan to expand the nuclear programme - expected to include a new reactor here at Torness. "Scotland and the UK can meet their targets for tackling climate change while maintainingfuelsecuritybyusingclean,safe alternatives that are already available," says FoE Scotland's chief executive, Duncan McLaren. "This government's obsession with nuclear power is a dangerous distraction in the fight against climate change. Trying to revive the polluting nuclear power industry will soak up valuable financial, political and technological resources, which could be much better directed at cutting energy use and boosting clean renewables."

Not so, responds Cowell. "It is too early to know what is feasible with tide, wind, andclean-coal,carbon-capture technologies," he says. "We don't yet know if or how they would close the energy gap as Cockenzie, Longannet and Torness close over the next 20 years.

"In Scotland we have benefited from thevisionarythinkingofthosewho constructed our post-war electricity supply system in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. By doing what they did, they passed on a fantastic legacy, with a really good balance between renewables, coal and nuclear. It's almost Utopian, and it gives us the ability to export some of our power.

"But if we don't have a proper plan to replace this ageing infrastructure as it comes towards the end of its life then the lights will go out. All of us in the industry can see that is blindingly obviously. It's immenselyfrustrating,especiallyin Scotland, that we haven't managed to grasp the nettle until now."

Cowell insists that the safety systems are failsafe, segregated and diverse. We can only takeitontrustwhenhesaysthata Chernobyl or a Three Mile Island simply could not happen here. But the industry in general is less convincing on the issue of nuclearwaste,foreventhepreferred solution of deep geological storage is still, to some extent, a problem deferred rather thanaproblemsolved.Or"adeadly radioactive waste legacy to which no solution yet exists", as Friends of the Earth would put it.

Cowell guides us through the plant, whose walls are plastered with safety notices. As we descend a flight of stairs, there is a gentle reprimand for not holding the handrail. It is part of the ethos to challenge behaviour that could cause accidents.

At the site's heart are the two reactors, where the clever business of splitting uranium atoms to create heat goes on. Aside from that little party trick, a nuclear power station is a remarkably simple thing. At Torness, the heat is conducted away from the reactor cores by gas coolant, transferred to water which then becomes superheatedsteam.Thesteamdrivesthe turbines, which turn the generators, which make the electricity.

From its viewing gallery, the turbine hall looks like it might have been designed by Fritz Lang at one of his more manic moments. But all the pipes and the plumbing and the mighty castings, and all the whooshing and skooshing and the whirling andbirling,haveanalmostcomically simple purpose. Out of this room pours 25% of Scotland's electricity. If you have four spotlights in your kitchen ceiling, then one of them is powered from here.

Throughout the nuclear industry, there is thinly disguised glee that global warming has taken the fiercest heat of public scrutiny away from them and towards their conventional cousins. Is it the best thing that could have happened to the nuclear business?Cowell'sresponseisalmostpainfullydiplomatic; his smile is much more telling.

It is one of the legends of the nuclear age that Robert Oppenheimer, the so-called father of the atomic bomb, after watching the first successful test of his brainchild at Los Alamos, in the New Mexico desert, muttered a dark line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita: "Now I am become Death," he is meant to have said. "The destroyer of worlds."

His brother, however, told it differently. In his version, what Oppenheimer said was: "It worked."