15 February 2009
The Labour government and the nuclear industry will this week renew their offensive on the Scottish government’s refusal to allow new reactors north of the border.
The UK’s Minister for Scotland, Jim Murphy, is opening a major international gathering of nuclear spin doctors in Edinburgh tomorrow. He is expected to attack Scottish ministers for their stance.
But the Scottish government, which is not taking part in the conference, has reiterated its opposition to nuclear power. And a Scottish Nationalist MSP has denounced the conference as “hype”.
The annual get-together of the world’s “nuclear communicators”, known as PIME 2009, is due to run for three days at the Sheraton Hotel in Edinburgh. One of the organisers is Foratom, the European nuclear industry’s trade association.
Foratom says that Murphy will criticise the Scottish government’s outlook for “being contrary to the best interests of Scottish consumers and at odds with increasing political consensus across Europe.”
One session at the conference, led by a senior executive from the advertising agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, will stress the need to “forcefully articulate key messages to an increasingly information-thirsty public”. This includes “high impact advertising” to “effectively sensitise citizens to the irrefutable advantages of nuclear energy”.
The blurb for another session says that more people than ever before are prepared to listen to the case for nuclear power. “The onus on communicators to effectively measure, interpret and influence public opinion is all the greater,” it adds.
The Scottish government pointed out that, in the year of the Homecoming, many people were coming to conferences in Scotland. But it went on to say that it was focussed on the development of renewable energy like wind, wave and tidal power.
“It would be foolish, misguided and plain wrong to turn our back on those possibilities or sacrifice them in pursuit of dangerous and unnecessary new nuclear power stations,” said a Scottish government spokesman.
“The risks and soaring costs of decommissioning and the unresolved problem of storage of radioactive waste will burden future generations for thousands of years.”
According to the SNP MSP Shirley-Anne Somerville, the nuclear industry was concerned that the public was seeing through its hype. “This is a conference on how to sell the nuclear idea to the people of Scotland,” she said. “Fortunately, the Scottish people are smarter than that.”
Pete Roche, a nuclear consultant based in Edinburgh, thought that the nuclear industry couldn’t tolerate the Scottish government holding out against its expansion plans. “This gathering of pro-nuclear spin doctors will attempt to work out a way to convince us black is white,” he said.
“They will try and tell us that this failed technology can help tackle climate change when, if fact, it is the worst option we could possibly choose.”
Whilst Labour's High Commissioner for Scotland, Jim Murphy tours the colonies advocating some obscene desire for Scotland of all places to reinvest in new Nuclear Plants, the Crown Estate with the support of the Scottish Government will tomorrow award "exclusivity agreements" to a range of power companies to develop 10 offshore wind farm sites.
UP TO 10 giant wind farms are to be built off the Scottish coastline which if all 10 are built as planned will produce 6.4 GIGAWATTS of power, more than doubling the amount of electricity produced by renewable forms of energy in Scotland at present and providing enough power for around 4 million homes.
There are currently 2.6 million homes in Scotland at present.
The rising value of the euro means construction projects in the UK are now far cheaper than was previously the case for international consortia and the project, pending Scottish Government assessment of the environmental implications of siting such large structures within territorial waters, approval times and the consortia's own scoping studies, these developments look liekly to proceed.
The wind farms will use undersea cables to transport their power ashore and connect to the national grid. The advantage of siting them off south-west Scotland is that there are two existing nuclear power stations already hooked up to the grid and they are relatively close to the country's major centres of population.
The Crown Estate will earn up to 2% of the value of the electricity generated, providing a lucrative annual windfall for the UK Treasury but one which post 2011 could be channelled into a Scottish Future's Fund. to help combat greenhouse emissions at and even faster rate of investment.
Posted by: Wardog | 15 February 2009 at 10:16 AM