Comment

Some years ago my colleague Roy Towers and I spent a week investigating Dounreay. We dutifully interviewed various protest groups, dissident employees, hostile local families with leukemia victims, doubting doctors worried about hot spots, and we grappled heroically with the nuclear industry's powerful publicity machine.

On the Friday night of a hard week we were invited to the home of Dounreay's boss, a genial Englishman, who poured us generous measures of gin and tonic.

Leaning back on his sofa he raised his glass in toast and challenged us bluntly. ''Tell me what you want to know - ask anything you wish. We have nothing to hide and I don't want you going back to Glasgow complaining that we would not answer your questions.''

There was a moment's silence and we had to confess that our curiosity had run out. We had spent days asking questions, thousands of them, about safety procedures and the plant's well-publicised failures, about spillages, leaks, hot spots, accidents and dumping irregularities, dodgy beaches, fish that glowed in the dark, and lost property in the form of highly enriched uranium.

At every turn we had been assured, hand on heart, by technical experts with whom it was impossible to argue, that everything at Dounreay was fine.

Leakages? They were miles below danger levels. Accidents? They did not breach acceptable limits. Losses? No damage was done. And so on and so on.

We emerged from our week without a great triumph for investigative journalism, but also quite unconvinced by what we had been told. Eventually we had to admit that our efforts as editorial gumshoes were a failure.

The old saying that knowledge is power applies nowhere more than in the nuclear industry where outside curiosity is reinforced by institutionalised secrecy. To find answers to questions you must first know which questions to ask. It was ever thus since Dounreay was conceived for reasons (the fast breeder reactor) which were considerably hush hush at the time. Without much public fuss the plant was banished to its beautiful and desolate site in Caithness for the very prudent reason that if things went bang it would blow up or otherwise despatch fewer people than it would in Hampstead.

So, from the start, Dounreay was characterised by that sinister dome and regarded from the outside with great suspicion. Its culture of secrecy became notorious, merely fuelling public disquiet. We became accustomed to hearing of Dounreay only when something went wrong as it did - yet again, spectacularly - this week, leading to its temporary shutdown just when it was being paraded as a safe haven for nasty imports from the Republic of Georgia which the Americans would not touch with a nuclear reprocessing plant.

When Tony Blair defended his secret deal with Bill Clinton by saying he would have made an announcement eventually, he was laughed at for good historical reasons. How many people really believe that there would have been a formal statement? Perhaps Mr Blair - who skipped mentioning the deal even to his own Parliament until he was forced to - would indeed have come clean. The point is he was widely disbelieved because secrecy is entrenched in the nuclear industry.

What is to be done about Dounreay? Its future is now a political issue which is destined to become a crucial point of dispute in next year's Scottish Parliament elections. After the fiasco this week in which the nuclear watchdogs ordered the place to be closed for safety reasons - just when ministers were proclaiming pride in Dounreay's capabilities - there is scope for a national debate on its future.

It was embarrassing enough for Ministers when the head of security at Dounreay quit in despair this month at the plant's ridiculous vulnerability to unwelcome guests; now the government's own inspectorate has piled on the humiliation by halting work in the fuel cycle, with little prospect of an early reopening. If Dounreay was held in suspicion before, what must the outside world think now? There is an irony in all of this which New Labour cannot ignore and which is heaven-sent for the anti-nuclear SNP. Ministers pontificate bravely these days in Scotland about making our changing style of government open and transparent. Yet Donald Dewar brushes aside questions about why the Government hushed up the Georgian shipment by saying dismissively that such matters are ''not normally advertised''. He does not even guarantee that future deals of this kind will be made public.

This is exactly the sort of thing which Dounreay's critics abhor. It feeds the indignation of the SNP and probably also the doubts of many others in Scotland who are not Nationalists but who have come to distrust Dounreay down the generations simply because they fear the unknown.

We need the whole truth about Dounreay.

The late Norman Buchan was fond of quoting Burns on the issue of truth:

Here's freedom to him who

would read

Here's freedom to him who

would write

There's nane ever feared

But the truth should be heard

But they whom the truth

would indict.