Rob Edwards

Selling water to England is a pipe dream, say experts

from Sunday Herald, 18 March 2012

Alex Salmond’s plan to sell water to England has run into a barrage of criticism from experts, who warn that it would be impractical, polluting and horrendously expensive.

They point out that other solutions to the droughts increasingly afflicting the southeast of England would be much cheaper and easier. They include digging a new reservoir near London and transporting water from wet areas much closer than Scotland, like Northumbria, the Lake District or parts of Wales.

Last week the Environment Agency warned that some areas of England were facing a severe and widespread drought this spring and summer. Seven water companies announced hosepipe bans from next month, preventing people in southern and eastern England from watering gardens, cleaning cars and filling swimming pools.

Interviewed by schoolchildren, Salmond suggested that Scotland could help alleviate the long term shortages. It would be a “great thing” if Scotland became known as the “land of clean water”, he argued.

“We are going to develop our water company so it can do things internationally,” he said. “There might well be an argument at some time for the transportation of water resources. And because it costs to transport, you would sell it on that basis as an ongoing commercial transaction.”

Scottish ministers have written to the coalition government in London offering to assist if water supplies ran low. “We have massive resources, and we are willing to help put those resources to use, to help the southeast of England solve the strategic water shortage,” said the Scottish infrastructure secretary, Alex Neil.

Boom in gas exploitation on land running into opposition

from Sunday Herald, 11 March 2012

A boom in exploiting underground gas in Scotland is running into mounting opposition from communities and environmentalists worried about the contamination of water supplies and climate pollution.

An investigation by the Sunday Herald has discovered that there are ten sites across the central belt and in the south west being explored and developed for methane, with the prospect of many more to come. The idea is to extract the flammable gas from deep coal beds by drilling, draining and pumping, perhaps using the highly controversial technique known as fracking.

But critics warn that, whether or not fracking is used, the risks that groundwater will be polluted and public health put at risk are “unacceptable high”. They also fear that exploiting the gas will make it impossible for Scotland to meet its targets to cut the carbon emissions that are disrupting the climate.

Coal bed methane is regarded by some in the energy industry as a potentially huge resource that could help replace dwindling supplies from the North Sea. A major Australian company, Dart Energy, is now behind most of the plans in Scotland. 

It took over the Scottish firm, Composite Energy, a year ago, acquiring a series of exploratory drilling sites in Falkirk, Stirling, Clackmannanshire and Fife (see table below). In recent weeks, it has also taken over licences acquired by another company, Greenpark Energy, in the Canonbie area of Dumfries and Galloway. 

Scotland failing to protect precious wildlife, warns government agency

from Caledonian Mercury, 08 March 2012

Scottish ministers are facing “reputational damage” for failing to keep their promise to protect the nation’s precious countryside, animals and plants, the government’s nature conservation agency has warned.

In a new assessment, Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH) says that crises with otters in Shetland and natterjack toads on the Solway coast have contributed to the stagnation of efforts to improve the state of Scotland’s 1,800 designated conservation areas since July last year.

Many sites are getting worse because of pollution, poor management, neglect and other threats. As a result, the Scottish government’s target to “improve the condition of protected nature sites” is being missed.

The target is a watered-down replacement of an earlier government aim to “increase to 95% the proportion of protected nature sites in favourable condition” by 2010. That was also missed, as less than 77% of sites are currently judged to be in a favourable condition.

SNH’s latest assessment comes in a report to a recent board meeting in Inverness on “business performance” over the last three months of 2011. The report highlighted the lack of progress on designated conservation areas.

“A key risk to the programme is a failure to deliver improvement in the favourable condition indicator resulting in reputational damage for SNH and Scottish government,” it said.

Most nuclear sites at risk of flooding and coastal erosion, says government study

from The Guardian, 07 March 2012

As many as 12 of Britain’s 19 civil nuclear sites are at risk of flooding and coastal erosion because of climate change, according to an unpublished government analysis obtained by The Guardian.

Nine of the sites have been assessed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) as being vulnerable now, with others in danger from rising sea levels and storms in future decades. They include all of the eight sites proposed for new nuclear power stations around the coast, as well as numerous radioactive waste stores, operating reactors and defunct nuclear facilities.

Two of the sites for new nuclear stations are said to have a “high risk” of flooding now: Sizewell in Suffolk and Hartlepool in County Durham, where there are also operating reactors. Shutdown and running reactors at Dungeness in Kent are also classed as currently at high risk.

Another of the sites most at risk is Hinkley Point in Somerset, where the first of the new nuclear stations is planned and there are reactors in operation and being decommissioned. According to Defra, it already has a “low” risk of flooding, and by the 2080s will face a high risk of both flooding and erosion.

Other new reactor sites that face some risk now and high risks by the 2080s are Oldbury in South Gloucestershire and Bradwell in Essex. The huge old nuclear complex at Sellafield in Cumbria is said to face a “medium risk” of flooding now and in the future. 

Revealed: RBS’s £3 billion investment in nuclear bombs

Exclusive, 06 March 2012

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) has been accused of “profiting from the terrible industry of death” by investing more than £3 billion since 2008 into companies which develop and make nuclear bombs around the world.

An authoritative new report has lifted the lid on the bank’s widespread financial support for 16 multinational corporations involved in nuclear weapons factories, missiles, bombers and submarines in the UK, the US and France.

Amongst those who have benefited from RBS loans and bond underwriting worth hundreds of millions of pounds are the US giants, Boeing, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman. Companies active in the UK like Rolls Royce, BAE Systems and Babcock have also been received financial backing worth many tens of millions of pounds (see table below).

The report has been endorsed by the famed South Africa anti-apartheid activist and Nobel peace prize laureate, Archbishop Desmond Tutu. “Nuclear weapons are an obscenity,” he said. “They are the very antithesis of humanity, of goodness in this world.”

Squandering billions of pounds on bombs “is an outrageous theft of public resources at a time when there are people who go hungry, when children are dying because they have no clean water, when diseases run rampant,” he argued.

Tutu called on banks like RBS to withdraw their investments in the nuclear arms industry. “Divestment was vital in the campaign to end apartheid in South Africa,” he said.

“Today, the same tactic can – and must – be employed to challenge man’s most evil creation: the nuclear bomb. No one should be profiting from this terrible industry of death, which threatens us all.”

The 180-page report, entitled “Don’t Bank on the Bomb”, was written by experts for the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, which brings together groups from 60 countries. It was funded by the Dutch ethical investment firm, Profundo.

Scotland failing to curb air pollution in cities, warns government agency

from Sunday Herald, 04 March 2012

Many thousands of people are going to be exposed to dangerous levels of air pollution in Scotland’s towns and cities for years to come because of the Scottish government’s failure to cut traffic fumes, ministers have been told.

The Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) has warned that revised targets to reduce air pollution - already postponed for up to a decade - will be breached because not enough is being done to curb exhaust emissions from cars, buses and lorries.

As a result, people in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Dundee and other urban areas will keep breathing in toxic gases, which can damage their lungs, blood and immune systems. According to the Institute of Occupational Medicine, air pollution kills over 600 people a year in the central belt.

An analysis by the Sunday Herald has revealed that European Union (EU) safety limits for nitrogen dioxide, one of the main vehicle exhaust fumes, were breached at 12 sites in urban areas across Scotland in 2011. As well as the four big cities, they included Perth, Paisley, Kirkintilloch, East Kilbride and Broxburn.

The safety limits were first agreed in 2001 and were meant to have been met by 2010. But new official figures show that, averaged out over all of last year, concentrations of nitrogen dioxide in the air near busy roads were often well above the limit of 40 micrograms per cubic metre.

Building a church from old beer cans

from Sunday Herald, 04 March 2012

It sounds like a cross between Heath Robinson and Blue Peter, with the blessing of the Almighty and a huge heap of ingenuity. And it’s definitely not rubbish.

Thousands of old beer cans, car tyres, shipping containers, industrial pallets and straw bales are being used to build a new church and community centre in Glasgow, all with the help of local people.

The cans are being used to construct walls and furniture, the tyres to form foundations, the containers and pallets to create buildings and the straw bales to provide insulation. It’s one of the most ambitious recycling projects in the country.

With the backing of grants from the Scottish government, the lottery and Glasgow City Council, work is now starting on the first phase of the project - building an “energy hub” and community centre in Milton, a disadvantaged district in north Glasgow.

After that, the plan is to build a church, a café, a theatre, a gallery and offices, set within a landscaped public park. Further grants of £2.2 million are being applied for with the aim of having it all finished by April 2014.

Scotland's spectacular scenery 'being wrecked by windfarm vultures'

from The Guardian, 28 February 2012

Scotland's spectacular mountain scenery is being wrecked by "windfarm vultures" making millions on the back of government subsidies, an environmental group says.

The warning follows a decision by the Scottish government to approve a 59-turbine windfarm on the Glenfiddich estate on Speyside, south of Dufftown. The estate is owned by Christopher Moran, a multi-millionaire London financier whose insurance and property business is said to be worth more than £200m.

Critics allege that he is now set to make more than £20m over 25 years for leasing his land for the windfarm, which is 1.4 miles from the boundary of the Cairngorms national park. They blame the "massive financial incentives" offered by Westminster.

"Christopher Moran is just one of many windfarm vultures circling around the Cairngorms national park," said Dave Morris, director of Ramblers Scotland. "Scotland's reputation as a beautiful, unspoilt country is being destroyed as massive industrial-scale wind turbines sprout from the hillsides. Never in the history of public subsidy has so much been given to so few, for so little public benefit."

"He's going to make another shedload out of this," said Robert McHugh, who runs a holiday cottage business near the proposed windfarm, known as Dorenell, and was involved in a local opposition group. "People like us care, and think this is a bad thing, but no politician actually cares."

Delay to safety approvals for new nuclear stations in UK

Exclusive, 27 February 2012

Vital safety approvals for new nuclear power stations in England and Wales have been delayed because of the Fukushima nuclear accident a year ago, according to the government’s Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR).

The design of the new reactor proposed by the French power companies, EDF and Areva, has 15 unresolved safety issues, including cracking risks in key components, fault studies of cooling and electrical failures and the dangers of flooding.

These have to be resolved before ONR will licence the construction of the new reactor but the programme for achieving this has slipped by two months. This is because more work than expected has been needed to address the issues raised by the Fukushima accident.

ONR has posted online its latest report on progress with the “generic design assessment” of proposed new reactors in the last quarter of 2012. It reveals that it has had to rejig its resources to cope with the delays.

“Some of the deliverables…have been late or do not provide the quality of information or depth of evidence that we expected,” ONR says. It has coded two issues as red, meaning that “delays cannot be recovered and will impact on the target closure date”.

Ethics and journalism

a talk to NUJ Edinburgh Freelance Branch, 20 February 2012

Finley Peter Dunne (1867-1936) was a journalist in Chicago. His famous Irish character, Dooley, once warned of the power of newspapers:

“The newspaper does everything for us. It runs the police force and the banks, commands the military, controls the legislature, baptises the young, marries the foolish, comforts the afflicted, afflicts the comfortable, buries the dead and roasts them afterwards.” 

One part of that has often since been taken up as summarising the job of a newspaper: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. I quite like that, only I would make it a little more political. The job of a journalist, as I see it, is to try and help the powerless by challenging the powerful.

Maybe not everyone will agree, but it’s a good starting point I think for discussing ethics in journalism this evening. In doing so I should make clear that what I say is no more and no less than my personal opinion, based on my experience as a freelance journalist over 30 years. I should stress that I don’t have any exclusive insight on ethics, nor any claim to be more or less ethical than any of my colleagues. 

Clyde bases plagued by nuclear safety flaws, says the MoD

from Sunday Herald, 19 February 2012

The Clyde bases that host Britain’s nuclear bombs and submarines are plagued by widespread safety flaws, according to an internal Ministry of Defence (MoD) report obtained by the Sunday Herald.

Critics fear that the problems could trigger a major nuclear accident at Faslane or Coulport that would contaminate Glasgow with radioactivity. They say this would be “unspeakable” and are demanding an urgent investigation.

The MoD’s latest annual review of safety reveals that 11 of the bases’ 13 activities have been officially declared unsatisfactory after assessments by site managers and regulators. The review was released last week in response to a request under freedom of information legislation.

Nine safety activities were colour-coded yellow because they were “below standard” and suffered “some specific weaknesses”. These included categories headed “weapons safety”, “safety culture”, “maintenance”, “safety performance indicators”, “site safety case”, “nuclear safety event reporting” and “conventional health and safety including fire safety”.

Two activities were coded orange because they were “significantly below standard” with “flawed” practices or procedures. They were headed “organisational change” and “operator experience feedback”.

New nuclear submarine held up by safety problems

from Sunday Herald, 19 February 2012

Britain’s newest nuclear submarine is facing a delay coming to the Clyde because of a major safety hitch at the shipyard where it is under construction, according to a report by the government’s nuclear watchdog.

HMS Ambush, the second of the Royal Navy’s new fleet of reactor-driven Astute-class submarines, is nearing completion at Barrow shipyard in Cumbria. But crucial safety tests on its reactor have been banned by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) until flaws in the yard’s emergency procedures have been fixed.

The submarine cannot go to sea until its reactor has been taken critical and fully tested in Barrow. According to the Ministry of Defence, the boat was originally due to begin sea trials from the Faslane naval base on Gareloch “by early 2012”.

But progress has been hampered because the Barrow yard’s operator, the arms giant BAE Systems, has twice failed to account for its staff after practice evacuations. In an emergency exercise on 19 October last year, it missed people “due to a number of anomalies with the personnel electronic accounting system and incorrect personnel actions,” said ONR.

The regulatory agency then instructed BAE Systems to rerun the exercise on 15 November, but the problem persisted. “Unfortunately, despite the fact that BAE Systems has upgraded the software, the exercise highlighted that a number of anomalies still remain,” ONR reported.

ExxonMobile fined £2.7m for pollution blunder at Fife plant

from Sunday Herald, 19 February 2012

The US oil multinational, ExxonMobile, has been fined £2.7 million for failing to report over 30,000 tonnes of climate pollution from a plastics plant in Fife - by far the highest fine for any environmental offence in British history.

Four other big companies have also been penalised for underestimating greenhouse gas emissions from plants in Scotland. They are the Dow Chemical Company, Tennent Caledonian, Pernod Ricard and FMC BioPolymer (see table below). 

The fines were levied by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) for breaches of the Europe Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme. This is the EU’s main tool for cutting the pollution that causes climate change, and it relies on companies accurately reporting their emissions.

This is the first time that Sepa has imposed such penalties, and the size of the fine on ExxonMobile has stunned observers. Previously, the largest fine for an environmental offence was the £1 million that another oil company, Shell, had to pay for polluting the River Mersey in 1989. 

Firms found guilty of misreporting their greenhouse gas emissions can be fined €100 for every tonne they miss. ExxonMobile was found to have missed 32,966 tonnes of emissions from its Mossmoran ethylene cracker plant in Fife in 2008, and so was fined €3.296 million (£2.738m).

Are wild beavers harbouring a health time bomb?

from Scottish Daily Mail, 17 February 2012

A parasitic tapeworm deadly to humans has been found in a beaver in Britain for the first time, increasing pressure on Scottish ministers to get rid of the beavers living wild in Tayside.

The tapeworm, Echinococcus multilocularis, was discovered in the liver of a beaver which died in captivity on a country estate in England. According to scientists, it is one of the most dangerous of animal parasites because it can kill people who come in contact with it.

Government inspectors are now checking the Tayside area, where around 100 beavers are thought to be living in the wild, for signs of the tapeworm. They are monitoring the corpses of foxes, which can pick up the parasite from scavenging dead beavers.

The fear is that the tapeworm could be passed to humans who come into contact with infected foxes or dogs. Since 1980 more than 550 people are reported to have become ill or died from the tapeworm in central Europe, where it is prevalent.

The Scottish environment minister, Stewart Stevenson, is currently considering what to do about the Tayside beavers, which have colonised rivers in a 50-square kilometre area between Aberfeldy, Forfar, Dundee and Perth. They either escaped from captivity or were deliberately released, and arguments are raging about whether to trap them, or leave them.

Nuclear police merger could create ‘conflict of interest’

from The Guardian, 13 February 2012

A government proposal to merge the UK's two nuclear police forces would be costly, messy and could create a conflict of interest between protecting British weapons and foreign-owned power stations, the Defence Police Federation has warned.

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) and the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) have launched a "scoping study" into whether to amalgamate the MoD police, which looks after nuclear bomb bases and other military sites, and the Civil Nuclear Constabulary (CNC), which has responsibility for nuclear power plants.

But the idea has already run into fierce criticism from the staff association that represents the MoD police rank and file. And other critics have raised fears about the abuse of a merged force for political purposes.

A merger would be "an extremely expensive exercise that would be unlikely to generate any savings in the short or medium term, and would distract from more realistic ways of reducing the MoD's budget deficit," said Eamon Keating, national chairman of the Defence Police Federation.

He pointed out that the MoD police had a much wider role than the CNC, including the ability to carry out investigations, the maintenance of public order and marine activities. "This divergence in roles, training and responsibilities would make any kind of amalgamation rather messy," he told the Guardian.

Revealed: how Scots are subsidising housing in English flood plains

from Sunday Herald, 12 February 2012

Scottish householders are paying for property development in southeast England by contributing to a £200-million-a-year “stealth subsidy” for insuring buildings in areas at high risk of flooding.

In order to keep insurance costs down for thousands of homeowners on English flood plains, owners in Scotland are being charged higher premiums, according to a leading flood insurance expert, David Crichton. And the costs for some are likely to rocket next year, he warns.

As many as 23% of homes in England are at risk of flooding, compared to under five per cent in Scotland. Because of pressures on space, more than one in ten new properties in England are still being built in flood risk areas – something that hasn’t happened in Scotland and Wales for years.

But because the insurance industry has promised that it will provide affordable flood insurance for every UK home and small business, those in low risk parts of Scotland are being made to pay more to subsidise those in high risk areas. This is a “stealth subsidy” which is unfair to Scotland, Crichton told the Sunday Herald.

“At present there is a subsidy of over £200 million per year from policyholders in low risk areas to those in high risk areas to enable continued flood plain development in the southeast of England,” he said. “Scots with their lower flood risk are paying a disproportionate share of this.”

Students launch RBS boycott

from Sunday Herald, 12 February 2012

Students at St Andrews University have voted to boycott the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) because of its “unethical” and “destructive” investments in support of the exploitation of tar sands in Canada.

A heated meeting of the university’s Student Representative Council agreed last week to move its account to another bank in protest at RBS’s backing for what environmentalists describe as one of the most climate-wrecking projects on earth.

“Tar sands are a major threat to human rights and the global environment and we want to make sure that our union does not support it,” said Lauren King, a member of St Andrews students’ environmental group, One World, which has been campaigning for a ban on RBS.

She visited Alberta last summer with campaigners from the People and Planet student network to learn about the impact of extracting oil from under the ground by strip mining. She was horrified to see toxic waste leaching into rivers, and local communities suffering from cancers previously unknown in the region.

New snake discovered in Scotland

from Sunday Herald, 05 February 2012

Scotland has a new snake. The first firm evidence that the grass snake is now living in the wild north of the border has been uncovered by a naturalist, upsetting decades of conventional wisdom.

It has long been assumed that the grass snake, a non-poisonous native of England, had not colonised Scotland. A few kept as pets had escaped, but there was no proof that any lived here, or had spread north naturally.

But now Chris Cathrine, a member of the Clyde Amphibian and Reptile Group and director of the Caledonian Conservation company, has discovered grass snakes in Dumfries and Galloway. There have been three verified sightings of the animals since 2009 and three more possible sightings in the area, according to a study he has completed.

“This is very exciting because it’s the first incontrovertible proof that grass snakes are present in the wild in Scotland,” he said. Along with the adder, the common lizard and the slow worm, it brings the number of native Caledonian reptiles to four.

Grass snakes could have spread north from England, encouraged by the warmer temperatures triggered by climate change in recent years. Or they could have lived here undetected for a while.

Cathrine’s investigation started in 2010 after he saw a grass snake in a pond in Upper Nithsdale. “I was balanced on a raft of vegetation searching for great crested newt eggs when I flushed out the grass snake,” he recalled.

MoD misses more radiation at Dalgety bay

from Sunday Herald, 05 February 2012

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has again missed hundreds of radioactive hotspots contaminating Dalgety Bay on the Firth of Forth, prompting accusations that it cannot be trusted to carry on monitoring.

The Sunday Herald can reveal that in the latest surveys of the Fife foreshore last month the MoD found and removed 83 radioactive particles. A survey of half the same area shortly afterwards by the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) found and removed a further 228 particles.

The failure of the MoD to detect most of the contamination was described a “cause for concern” by Sepa. “This reinforces the need to have credible investigation plans in place,” said a Sepa spokeswoman.

In December the Sunday Herald reported that previous monitoring of Dalgety Bay by the MoD had missed 442 radioactive hotspots. If the MoD fails to come up with credible clean-up plans by the end of this month, Sepa has said it will formally designate the bay as Britain’s first radioactively contaminated land in an attempt to force the MoD to act.

Scottish nuclear dump plan dropped

from Sunday Herald, 05 February 2012

A £3.2 million project that could have led to Hunterston in North Ayrshire becoming a nuclear waste dump for the rest of Scotland has been abandoned in the wake of protests by local residents and environmentalists.

Investigations into a plan to bury large amounts of radioactive graphite underground on the site have been suspended by the UK government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). Instead, the graphite waste will be stored in a huge engineered shed recently built at Hunterston.

Critics had feared that burying the graphite would have freed up space in the shed for waste from other nuclear sites across the country. They have welcomed the decision to drop the graphite burial project.